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Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres by Jamie Woodcock

always be closing, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, David Graeber, emotional labour, gamification, invention of the telephone, job satisfaction, late capitalism, means of production, millennium bug, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, profit motive, scientific management, social intelligence, stakhanovite, technological determinism, women in the workforce

The rejection of work therefore appears to be a common phenomenon in call centres and is a theme that we will return to throughout the book. The authors of Call Centers for Dummies admit that ‘not everyone thinks that call center changes and evolution are positive’.63 They locate this in part due to ‘the impact of call centers on everyone’s daily lives, and partly because some call centers had bad management and used bad business practices’. The workers 21 Working the Phones in call centres are completely absent from their analysis; instead they focus on how call centres ‘have raised the ire of consumers and caught the attention of legislators’, something they blame on ‘overly aggressive business practices’.

Meanwhile, The Wolf of Wall Street captures the top-seller type of dynamic that call centres try to promote: if you sell hard enough you will be successful. Nevertheless, they both illustrate a number of key points and provide the first glimpses of what we will later explore. where did call centres come from? Call Centers for Dummies claims to be ‘a road map that can help you lead and manage a call centre’.20 The authors ‘make some assumptions’ about who is reading the book and suggests that they might be ‘a hotshot MBA tracking through your career, and you find yourself running a call center’,21 which is perhaps ironic considering the title of the book.

Call Centers for Dummies claims to be ‘a road map that can help you lead and manage a call centre’.20 The authors ‘make some assumptions’ about who is reading the book and suggests that they might be ‘a hotshot MBA tracking through your career, and you find yourself running a call center’,21 which is perhaps ironic considering the title of the book. The authors themselves are quite vague about the history of call centres, writing, ‘although we can’t really tell you when the first call center opened, we imagine that call centers started around the time that the telephone became a common household device . . . the evolution of call centers just makes sense’.22 11 Working the Phones This common sense point about the development of call centres is useful; however, as with many phenomena, it is important to go beyond the conclusion that something happened because it ‘just makes sense’. A logical starting point is the invention of the telephone.


pages: 352 words: 104,411

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

There’s a high churn rate among call-centre workers, and they burn out far quicker than Dutch bus drivers. Deep feels that this is because ‘your mentality changes’ when you work in a call centre. ‘You try to think like an American, but you’re not really an American, you’re an Indian. And sometimes you make the wrong decisions… You’re earning good, you’re looking good, you’re admired — that’s outside. But on the inside, you have a void.’ Ironically, many Indian telecommuters not only have to face the stress of virtual travel but also have to endure the discomforts of commuting in the flesh. Although call centres may ease congestion in the West, they increase it in the places they are built.

This is all very taxing: it’s as if they’d been teleported to the same locations as the people they are servicing down the phone and online. While call-centre workers, according to Deep, are trained ‘to think like Westerners, to talk like them, and to spend all day talking to them. The culture seep[s] through, but not all of the culture. Most of the people who work on the floor have never been to America or Great Britain… There are enormous gaps in their mental picture that they simply fill with their imagination and the movies.’ Sometimes, such measures aren’t enough. When Eve Butler, a seventy-six-year-old Welsh woman, was put through to an Indian call centre in January 2013 instead of to BT’s Welsh Language Bureau, the operator she spoke to was forced to admit that he couldn’t connect her to a Welsh-speaking service because the language, and indeed the country, were mysteries to him.

At home in India, meanwhile, Roy worked to persuade the government that telecommuting was a good idea, and that he should be allowed to build facilities to accommodate it. At times he had to overcome surreal obstacles: I went to meet bureaucrats after they sat on our application for months. A government official said he could approve a call center, but could not approve a center to handle ‘incoming and outgoing calls’. So we had to print definitions of a call center from the Internet and take them to him to show him that’s what a call center did. In keeping with the Jack Nilles vision of telecommuting – that it might employ people who were excluded from the labour market either because they couldn’t get to it or weren’t expected to be there – Roy pushed for the right to employ women on his so-called ‘graveyard shifts’ that ran from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

That’s why many describe twenty-first-century workplaces as being governed by Taylorism 2.0, or Digital Taylorism.39 Any work composed of repetitive tasks and of sufficient scale is a prime target for Digital Taylorism, and right at ground zero sit three million US call centre workers. At first blush, a phone call between two people expressing the vast possibilities of human language hardly seems like a repetitive event, but if you’ve ever been herded through narrow conversational paths by seemingly robotic call centre workers, you’ve experienced the effects of Digital Taylorism. Calls are measured down to the second and every event that impacts the company’s bottom line is recorded, whether that’s issuing a costly refund or upselling an oblivious customer to a more expensive subscription service.

In doing so, they’ll only be replicating what’s typical in the industry today, except at wider scale: Noble Systems’ call centre gamification platform supposedly “appeals to today’s Millennial and Generation Z employee teams and uses both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors to promote and reinforce desired behaviors and gain greater buy-in” (as a millennial, I’m not so sure on that); and in 2021, several news sites reported that Teleperformance began surveilling thousands of its call centre employees working at home due to COVID-19 via webcam, with its built-in gamification platform delivering “the reward and recognition of successful behaviours and outcomes.”44 It’s tempting to assume that Digital Taylorism will be limited to lower-paid workers who don’t have the option to walk out the door.

“News: Noble Gamification Wins 2018 CUSTOMER Contact Center Technology Award,” Contact Center World, October 15, 2018, www.contactcenterworld.com/view/contact-center-news/noble-gamification-wins-2018-customer-contact-center-technology-award-2.aspx; Peter Walker, “Call Centre Staff to Be Monitored via Webcam for Home-Working ‘Infractions,’” Guardian, March 26, 2021, www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/26/teleperformance-call-centre-staff-monitored-via-webcam-home-working-infractions; “Digital Platforms,” Teleperformance, accessed November 26, 2021, https://pt.www.teleperformance.com/en-us/solutions/digital-platforms. 45. Andy Silvester, “Exclusive: Barclays Installs Big Brother-Style Spyware on Employees’ Computers,” City A.M., February 19, 2020, www.cityam.com/exclusive-barclays-installs-big-brother-style-spyware-on-employees-computers. 46.


pages: 329 words: 95,309

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Branch networks are the foundations whilst electronic distribution is the cream on the cake. This is why retail banks talk about multichannel strategies where they try to integrate their call centre channel with their internet channel; they attempt to deliver mobile banking interoperable with the call centre channel; they mess about with CRM to ensure consistency across branch and internet channels. My problem is this: banks only have one channel. They do not have multichannels, call centre channels, internet channels, mobile channels and so forth. They just have an electronic channel that underscores and provides the foundation for all end points: mobile, telephone, internet and branch.

Over time, another channel appeared, the direct sales representative. These sales folk resided in branches and were served by the branch system. Then, a new channel popped up, the call centre. The call centre was like one massive remote branch and required a new structure to operate. But the underlying data could be delivered through the branch-based systems, so the new structure was primarily designed to sit on top of those systems, offering scripts into the various products the bank offered. The call centre people struggled with this – sometimes operating six or more windows of screens at any one time to get a competitive picture of the customer’s needs – but they lived with it.

For 21 years the bank has grown and evolved to suit those people who want to use them, who are typically higher net worth, internet-savvy, educated professionals. Today, the bank sits firmly within the HSBC empire as a model of how to do remote, bank without branches servicing. This is illustrated by the fact that the core call centre technologies are about to go through a refresh to be the platform for all of one HSBC’s global call centre platforms. But it’s still a bank about people and human interaction. For example, Matt retold a story last week of one call centre operator who’s bag was lost on a train, together with her ticket, so the keen young service guy dived down to the train station with cash in hand to pay for her train ticket. That’s service.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

You might think by hiding phone numbers on your website you save costs by reducing call centre load. Research shows, however, that if you can direct customers to the correct call centre number quickly, you reduce traffic and costs—rather than leave customers to experiment by calling many different numbers. On every product or transaction page on your website, list the specific call centre number for that type of product/service. This can direct customers to an Interactive Voice Response menu specifically designed for that query, which will reduce call centre load and ensure CSR (customer service representatives) are appropriately equipped to answer specific questions.

They might wire money to a third party, visit an ATM to withdraw cash, go online to check if their salary has been deposited, pay a utility bill, use their credit card to purchase some goods from a retailer, fill out a personal loan application online, ring up the call centre to see what their credit card balance is, or report a lost card. If they are sophisticated customers or clients, they may also trade some stocks, transfer some cash from their Euro forex account to their US dollar account, put a lump sum in a mutual fund, or sign up for a home insurance policy online. In the early days of the Internet and call centre, it was not uncommon to find that the call centre and internet banking were 24 hours behind the in-bank systems because the “batch” processes that updated the alternate channel databases/logs ran overnight.

Even better, why not put the same list on the homepage! Compile this list of these “top” service enquiries by checking call centre data for the most frequent call types over the last six months. By simply putting the answers of these frequent issues on the site, you can reduce call centre traffic by 10–20 per cent. Keep in mind you would actually have to provide a solution on the site, and not just some FAQs. There may have to be some process intelligence. But get this right and those customers already going to your website to solve this problem will not ring your call centre. Thus, immediate load reduction . . . Remind customers when they withdraw cash from an ATM that their credit card payment is due.


pages: 256 words: 79,075

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Berlin Wall, call centre, clockwatching, collective bargaining, congestion charging, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, Greyball, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, low skilled workers, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, post-truth, post-work, profit motive, race to the bottom, reshoring, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, working poor, working-age population

Then it would have been within our power to resist had the company tried to snatch anything back. The situation in some call centres is, of course, worse than anything I experienced at Admiral. In order to coax firms to keep their call centres in Wales – rather than relocate offshore to places like India – companies have trumpeted the purported ‘flexibility’ of the workforce (see: part-time, casual, poorly paid). Cardiff houses many of Wales’s biggest call centres, and a lady called June, who worked at another outsourcing call centre, relayed to me just how stressful this sort of environment could sometimes be. ‘[The staff] get stressed because the targets for sales and all that ...

Yet as a youth worker I would meet in Ebbw Vale told me: ‘If you’ve studied and you’ve got a degree, do you really wanna be working in a call centre?’ Probably not, and you will notice that the celebrities and commentators who bleat on endlessly about graft and hard work rarely send their own children to toil away fruitlessly in call centres and scrabble around pulling vegetables out of the ground in the sodden fields of Kent. In Wales I was working as a ‘Renewals Consultant’. It was up to me to persuade customers who had found a cheaper car insurance quote elsewhere to stick with Admiral. There are around 5,000 call centres in the UK, employing around a million people.7 As well as Swansea, Admiral has offices in Cardiff and Newport and is famously a ‘good’ company to work for.

I had got through the interview process at local car insurance company Admiral, and had been offered a position renewing customers’ policies in one of its call centres. The company required immediate ‘proof of address’ in the local area. While none of the ‘professional’ jobs I have done have ever required this, at Admiral – as at Amazon and Carewatch – it was considered urgent. Thus I had to get a deposit down on a place right away – spending more money than I had intended to in the process – and chase up my bank for the ellusive statement with my new address on it. Brynmill is a relatively affluent suburb adorned mostly with dirty white stuccoed terraces. Living there whilst working from eight till five in a call centre you soon come to realise just what vastly different worlds students and locals in university towns and cities often inhabit.


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

If you think shop workers have it bad, consider now the call centre worker. There are now nearly a million people working in call centres, and the number is going up every year. To put that in perspective, there were a million men down the pits at the peak of mining in the 1940s. If the miner was one of the iconic jobs of post-war Britain, then today, surely, the call centre worker is as good a symbol of the working class as any. 'Call centres are a very regimented environment,' says John McInally, a trade unionist leading efforts by the PCS to unionize call centre workers. 'It's rows of desks with people sitting with headphones.

That's one reason why the sickness rate in call centres is nearly twice the national average. The other is deep alienation from the work. In One call centre McInally dealt with in Northern England, sickness rates had reached nearly 30 per cent. 'That's a sign oflowmorale,' he says-as is the fact that annual staff turnover is around a quarter of the workforce. And, like so much of the new working class, the salaries of call centre workers are poor. A trainee can expect £12,500, while the higher-grade operators are on an average of just £16,000. Twenty-eight-year-old Carl Leishman has been a call centre worker in County Durham for eight years.

John McInally has been leading valiant attempts by the pes union to organize call centre workers. He believes that there are real grounds for optimism, because of one key similarity between call centres and old- style factories: large numbers of workers concentrated in one place. But he has no illusions about the obstacles that are in the way, not least because of how regimented the work is. 'You could have four hundred people in a room, or a couple of rooms, who may see each other every day but never speak to each other,' he says. Just as factory workers were stuck at their looms in Victorian times, call centre workers are stuck at their desks.


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

No dream job Part of the problem is that call-centre work tends not to be much fun – although Indians enjoy much better pay, relative to other local jobs, than British or American call-centre employees. At Wipro Spectramind, two “fun day” employees try to jolly the place up as rows of cubiclefarm workers use a piece of software called “retention buddy 1.3” to dissuade Americans from cancelling their internet subscriptions. Sanjay Kumar, the boss of vCustomer, one of the few remaining independent Indian call-centre companies, says the industry’s growth potential may be limited. He thinks the total pool of call-centre workers is only about 2m, and awkwardly scattered across India – although that still leaves a lot of room for expansion from the current 300,000 or so.

More awkwardly still, the very industries said to be badly hurt by the migration of jobs overseas report a shortage of workers at home. Most of the jobs created in India are either in call-centres or at it firms. But call-centre companies in both Britain and America suffer from rising staff turnover and struggle to recruit more people. Britain’s Call-Centre Association, a trade lobby, thinks that employment in the industry in Britain will rise in the next few years; in the United States, call-centre employment is expected to decline slightly. As it spending recovers from recession, labour markets in America I 144 A WORLD OF WORK and Europe are becoming tighter in this industry too.

The pioneers were ge, American Express and British Airways, who all arrived in the late 1990s. These companies were joined by home-grown call-centre operators such as 24x7, vCustomer, Spectramind and Daksh. Spectramind has since been bought by Wipro, and Daksh by ibm. These Indian firms also face competition from specialist American call-centre companies which, like the global it firms, have been adjusting to the cheap Indian competition by taking themselves to India. By far the most successful of these foreign firms has been America’s Convergys, which with a total of around 60,000 employees is the biggest call-centre operator in the world. By the end of 2005, says the company’s local boss, Jaswinder Ghumman, Convergys hoped to employ 20,000 people in India.


pages: 207 words: 59,298

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

The advent of the assembly line meant that production could then be sped up on this basis, trying to take control away from workers. Managers in call centres were able to use technological methods of surveillance to electronically measure the work process in great detail (Woodcock, 2017). Many work platforms follow on from these traditions, albeit without the physical supervision found in either factories or call centres. Some platform infrastructures allow the real-time location tracking and timing of every worker. This develops the forms of surveillance from the call centre, deploying them beyond the walls of a workplace (Woodcock, forthcoming). Some cloud platforms, in contrast, can monitor every digital activity performed by a worker on-platform.

For example, a worker at Deliveroo explained that they preferred it as: you’re not selling anything, you’re not selling yourself so there’s no emotional labour in it and I think that’s why it’s been like a job that I’ve stuck at longer than other shit jobs because I find it a lot easier to not do that sort of selling yourself side of things. The alternative kinds of work that they described included service work based in a restaurant or working the phones in a call centre. This, despite the fact they still described Deliveroo as a ‘shit job’, made it comparatively better than the conditions in high-pressure call centres (Woodcock, 2017). Similarly, another worker explained that they ‘wanted to work outside and with a bicycle, because it’s my passion working with a bicycle’. For younger workers, the gig economy offers the potential – and it is important to stress that this is a potential, as we discuss further later in the book – for different ways of working.

This means that management are more likely to act unilaterally, without the checks of collective bargaining or negotiation. Globalization and outsourcing The final precondition that has deeply shaped the gig economy in its current form is a combination of political economy and technology: the effects of globalization and outsourcing. This is a development and intensification of the outsourcing of call centres from high-income countries to low- and middle-income countries, for example, from the UK to India (Taylor and Bain, 2005). This laid the organizational basis for wider business process outsourcing that has become today’s online outsourcing. However, globalization has not only meant the shifting of work and trade to different parts of the world, but also brought about a generalization of what Barbrook and Cameron (1996) have termed the ‘Californian Ideology’, referring to the encouragement of deregulated markets and powerful transnational corporations.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Forrester argued that companies which wait too long to offer good e-commerce channels risk losing market share to more digitally-minded competitors. Call centres We are still at the very early stages of introducing artificial intelligence to call centres. For many of us, dealing with call centres is one of the least agreeable aspects of modern life. It normally involves a good deal of waiting around, listening to uninspiring hold music, followed by some profoundly unintelligent automated routing, and finally a conversation with a bored person the other side of the world who is reading from a script written by a sadist. One of the leaders in introducing genuine AI to call centres is Swedbank, one of Sweden's biggest banks, with 9.5m customers and 160,000 employees.

Online shopping is perhaps the ultimate prosumer experience. Consumer reviews replace the retailer’s sales force, and its algorithms do the up-selling. Call centres Of course, automation and prosumption is not always to the benefit of consumers. In markets where switching costs or partial monopolies dilute the standards-raising effect of competition, companies can save money for themselves in ways which actually make life worse for their customers. We are all familiar with call centres where (for instance) utility companies and banks have automated their customer service operations, obliging frustrated customers to plough through various levels of artificial un-intelligence in order to get their problem resolved.

The customer would be much better off if a human picked up the call immediately, but that would cost the companies a lot more money, and they have no incentive to incur that cost. Things are improving, however, as the AI used in call centres advances. Just as most people choose to withdraw cash from ATMs rather than venture into the bank and wait in line for a human cashier, many call centre operations are now getting good enough at handling or triaging problems that we may soon prefer to deal with the automated system than with a human. Food service The automation of service in fast food outlets seems to have been just around the corner for decades.


pages: 255 words: 92,719

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs

Anton Chekhov, bank run, banking crisis, Bullingdon Club, call centre, Chelsea Manning, credit crunch, David Graeber, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial independence, future of work, G4S, glass ceiling, industrial robot, job automation, land reform, low skilled workers, mittelstand, Northern Rock, payday loans, Right to Buy, scientific management, Second Machine Age, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, wages for housework, Wall-E

‘I’m not from a religious background, but the whole process of serving somebody … it’s good for everyone,’ R said. ‘You’re giving them service but at the same time, they’re feeling welcomed.’ T, 32, call centre special adviser, Lincoln Behind a branch of a fast-food chain in Lincoln, there is a featureless yellow brick call centre open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day. From the level of noise as the call centre handlers walk in, they can often guess what’s happening across the country. Bad weather causes a surge in the number of calls: a dense, chattering sound. A terrorist attack is loud. But less dramatic worries are quieter and more frequent: anger at a lost connection, sorrow for a family member passed away, simple loneliness.

I first met Reilly in June 2004 when we worked together in the Saga motor insurance call centre in Folkestone. He had just finished a degree in Film Studies at the University of Kent. We learned to log prangs and crashes, to enunciate, explain and navigate computer systems. Reilly took it all just seriously enough; he and his friend Nick made me laugh a lot more than I expected to in a minimum wage job. I left at the end of the summer to study for a master’s in English Literature; Reilly stayed. He had wanted to write novels when he was little; at 13 he wanted be a journalist at the New Musical Express. After a year in the call centre he took four weeks’ leave to do work experience at the local paper.

Now it’s autumn; soon winter will come and cover us with snow, and I will work, I will work. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters CONTENTS IN DOVER MAKING: potter, shoemaker, robot SELLING: fishmonger, creative director, councillor, homesteader, legal aid lawyer SERVING: sex worker, baristas, call centre adviser, special adviser LEADING: company director, stay-at-home mum, hereditary lord ENTERTAINING: dancer, footballer, giggle doctor THINKING: scientist, question writer, professor CARING: care worker, cleaner, crofter REPAIRING: rabbi, army major, nurse STARTING: apprentice, intern, technologist, unemployed, on workfare AT SCHOOL References Acknowledgements IN DOVER IN THE COLD BACK ROOM of a charity shop, a group of volunteers are working.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

It was impressive how much we believed that games could have an impact on the world. What was missing from the project’s focus was the effect that gamification was already having in the real world. When I worked in a call center as part of an inquiry for my last book, I saw firsthand the use of gamification at work. The call center was filled with ways to collect metrics and measure worker performance. At the simplest level, the large screen over the call center floor compared each worker’s performance in real time by ranking them from best seller to worst. While this never convinced me to try my hardest to reach the top of the leader board, it certainly motivated me to try a little harder so as not to stay in last place for the entire shift.

I was one of the unlucky ones to be working the night shifts. That’s 8pm–8am, six days a week, testing Grand Theft Auto. It was horrendous. I didn’t see daylight for months. This was perceived as a requirement and if you had issues with it, you were told “Well, you can go stack shelves at Tesco instead or answer phones at a call centre.” You were treated as disposable.30 Many of these forms of work “below the line” are gendered in various ways. For example, in the increasingly important area of publicity and marketing, in which publishers compete in ever more crowded marketplaces for videogames, the sector is “solidly pink-collar,” with public relations workers over 85 percent female.

Lebowitz, Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis (Boston: Brill, 2009), 314. 15Lebowitz, Following Marx, 310, 314. 16Karl Marx, “A Workers’ Inquiry,” New International 4, no. 12 (1938): 379. 17Marx, “A Workers’ Inquiry,” 379. 18Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, 58. 19Jamie Woodcock, “The Workers’ Inquiry from Trotskyism to Operaismo: A Political Methodology for Investigating the Workplace,” Ephemera 14, no. 3 (2014): 493–513. 20Jamie Woodcock, Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres (London: Pluto, 2017). 21“Interview with Vittorio Rieser,” Generation Online, October 3, 2001, www.generation-online.org/t/vittorio.htm. 22Notes from Below editors, “The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition,” Notes from Below 1 (January 29, 2018), www.notesfrombelow.org/article/workers-inquiry-and-social-composition. 23Julian Kücklich, “Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry,” Fibreculture Journal 5, no. 1 (2005). 24Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 32. 25Kücklich, “Precarious Playbour.” 26Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 27. 27Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 50. 28Ergin Bulut, “Glamor Above, Precarity Below: Immaterial Labor in the Video Game Industry,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 32, no. 3 (2015): 203. 29Bulut, “Glamor Above, Precarity Below,” 203. 30Ian G.


pages: 312 words: 78,053

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Burning Man, call centre, Drosophila, Higgs boson, hive mind, index card, Large Hadron Collider, Live Aid, Magellanic Cloud, McJob, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

I spent a few years subsisting by cleaning up debris and rebuilding structures for NGOs like UNICEF and UNESCO. Unlike many young men my age, I refused to be lured to Dubai, and after the cleanup was complete, I was fortunate to find a job sweeping and cleaning at a call centre for Abercrombie & Fitch in a warehouse building at Bandaranaike Airport. I knew this was only temporary, as my love of American-produced global culture and my knowledge of the inner life of Craigs would one day allow me to become an actual call centre phone staffer, and yes, after some years my wish came true. I quickly rose through the ranks and was placed in charge of the Abercrombie & Fitch American-Canadian Central Time Zone Call Division.

I could make a list of other such examples, but I will not. Nobody in the call centre witnessed my bee stinging me. I looked at it, and it was like seeing a long-lost friend—the happiness it brought me! I quite forgot young Leslie from the New York Times on the other end of the line. She probably interpreted my silence as artistic temperament, but she finally asked, “Werner? Werner, are you there?” I told her that my name wasn’t actually Werner, it was Harj, and that I was sorry I had led her on, and that I was actually working in an Abercrombie & Fitch call centre in Trincomalee, the capital of Sri Lanka. “Don’t dick with me.

“Wow.” Then the three of them leaned against the front desk with casual American elegance and asked what I was up to. I said, “I have been working in a company call centre in Sri Lanka for many years now, and it has always been my dream to visit the headquarters of our esteemed company.” The first Craig said, “Seriously? I mean, it’s nice here, dude, but it’s not a destination.” The second Craig asked me what it was like to work in a call centre. “In Sri Lanka,” I said, “I enjoyed providing a completely customer-centric operation by consistently enhancing customer service as I tried to gain a better understanding of our customers’ shopping patterns and preferences across Abercrombie & Fitch’s multiple shopping channels.


pages: 325 words: 99,983

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

This is not the Indian English of Hobson–Jobson and the bazaar or the standardised American and British English of the universities, but the emerging supranational lingua franca that enables a call centre in Bangalore to answer impossible queries, or sell new products, as far afield as Cheltenham in the UK, Cedar Rapids in the United States or Co. Cork, Eire. Many major cities in India now have call centres, with a dynamic effect on the local economy (call centre employees enjoy a salary as much as five times the national average). The road to Electronics City is symbolic of old India, but the Infosys campus, barely five miles from the centre of the city, is an oasis of Globish.

Five Point Someone features soft drugs, binge drinking, and an affair between a student and his professor’s daughter. One Night @ the Call Centre is a romantic comedy set in a call centre office where bored young Indians try to resolve the mindless enquiries of midwestern American technophobes. Bhagat says that his novel reflects a generational divide in India. His model society is China, not the modernising China of Deng Xiaoping, but the radicalising China of Mao Zedong. ‘India needs a cultural revolution to change mindsets,’ Bhagat told the Guardian. ‘In China it was bloody, but India needs to learn that the old ways are not always the best ways.’ One Night @ the Call Centre has already sold about 2 million copies.

In Bangalore, I climbed a rickety outside staircase to the offices of ‘Easy English’ (advertising ‘Spoken English, Call Centre Training, Placements’) to learn about the programme on offer to the would–be student. ‘Easy English’ turned out to be a husband–and–wife team, operating out of four rooms (and a tiny kitchen), with a clientele of barely a dozen students who were paying 1,500 rupees a month, a substantial commitment, to acquire enough English to apply to one of the call centres. How long, I wondered, had ‘Easy English’ been in business here? ‘Six months.’ The proliferation of such training rooms happens at the end of the Globish food chain.


pages: 196 words: 55,862

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

If you ever had a problem, like a puncture or a crash, you could ring Deliveroo’s call centre. One recurring issue was inadvertent calzone: if someone ordered a single pizza, it had a lot of space to bang about in your bag, and when climbing or descending a hill could easily get folded. You’d arrive and take the box out your backpack, only to find tomato sauce soaking through the cardboard. The call centre workers responded to this by reordering the pizza (at the company’s expense) and telling you to offer the pizza to the customer. Sometimes, however, the call centre workers would tell you to give it to the homeless. I suspected that some call centre workers were going off script in an effort to help people out, or maybe the company just changed its tune in order to get some good publicity.

Everyone had something specific they wanted changed: from the amount of time you wasted ‘on hold’ to the call centre when a delivery went wrong, to the state of the kit, to the triple orders which were bad for the customer, to the lack of discounts at local bike shops, to the rates of pay. The demands to solve those problems varied wildly. Some workers wanted a wearable video camera to be a standard part of the kit so that if an accident took place we’d all have a record of it; others wanted insurance deals, an £8 guarantee for the first hour you logged on, a £12 guarantee for all the time you were logged on, more call centre staff, and on and on. The attitudes towards management were all over the place.

Uphadya, are discussing overcoming the vertical isolation of software engineers by organizing ‘technoscientific’ points of production.28 This organization could be structured industrially (organizing all workers in one industry, rather than all workers in one job role), and so recompose different layers of the working class into one united front against the black box and the bosses.29 Together, couriers and tech workers would have much more leverage than either group on their own. The disconnect of these two workforces is a key point that allows Deliveroo to systematically exploit workers on the ground and systematically control workers in its HQ. But industrial-scale organization at Deliveroo could go even further than that: workers in the Deliveroo customer service call centres, cleaning the Deliveroo offices, and guarding the Deliveroo sites all have the same interests as us. Even beyond just Deliveroo, workers in the food service industry at large have the same interests as us: the chefs, waiting staff, and agricultural workers on whom the whole industry relies all also deserve better pay and conditions.


pages: 233 words: 69,745

The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches From the Edge of Life by The Reluctant Carer

call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, disinformation, gig economy, Jeff Bezos, load shedding, place-making, stem cell, telemarketer, trolley problem

Since that admission, which also raised the spectre of Mum alone in the house when Dad is hospitalized, we have taken what we deem to be appropriate measures. Chief among these is an ‘alert-call’ system: an emergency button worn about the old person’s person, which, when pressed, signals a call centre who then contact the house through a dedicated microphone and speaker unit and ask if they’re all right. If the caller is too unwell to answer or too far away, the call centre agents contact the emergency services. This costs just a few pounds a month and seems an excellent innovation. Yet nothing here is straightforward. To set up the system I had to check its range and figured that the furthest my parents could ever go without leaving altogether would be the far end of the garden.

He is bent double trying to fix the satellite receiver and has a phone to his ear. I take the phone and help him up. The person on the line is trying to sell him an expanded TV package. I explain that he is no longer listening, that I am his son. ‘Put Daddy back on the phone,’ says the man in the call centre. I freeze at this. My dad has never been known as ‘Daddy’, and we are not about to start now. As I ferry him back to his seat, I figure out what has gone down, and it is in these kinds of mindless crises that I really come into my own. With mum’s deafness it is essential that the TV has subtitles, or it must be at a volume that could destroy a passing bird.

I press the buttons that reinstate the subtitles. I have done this before; I will do it again. It’s part of the elderly care territory. You become their short-term memory. A portable hard drive. Meanwhile: ‘Where is Daddy?’ ‘Please don’t say “Daddy”,’ I ask. ‘Daddy wants the expanded package,’ insists the call-centre caller. ‘I’m an idiot,’ says Dad, ruefully. I promise him he’s not. He seems unconvinced. ‘Turn this up!’ yells Mum, even though the subtitles are back on. It’s an advert. ‘Where is Daddy!?’ He’s really going for it now, this desperate, distant salesman. ‘Daddy doesn’t want to talk to you any more,’ I say.


pages: 336 words: 83,903

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

In many modern workplaces, computer technologies are not used to enhance the worker’s capacities, but to enforce new extremes of work intensification and control. Studies of today’s classic example of bad work – the call centre – document a number of practices that are now commonplace. Auto-diallers connect both inbound and outbound calls straight to employees’ headsets, with no breaks permitted between calls. Monitoring software collects data on each worker’s productivity, automatically reporting tardy or under-performing workers to their managers, so they can be singled out for coaching, disciplinary action or embarrassment. One study describes the modern call centre as an ‘electronic panopticon’ (Fernie and Metcalf, 2000), whereas another refers to the ‘assembly line in the head’ of the call centre worker, who always knows that the completion of one task will immediately be followed by the uptake of another (Taylor and Bain, 1999).

From great structures like churches and bridges to cultural artefacts like novels and video games – all of these things are the product of work. The trouble with defining work in these terms, however – as a form of creative activity – is that it becomes difficult to know what we should call work that is not creative but menial and routine. Workers who complain about their jobs in call centres, on supermarket checkouts, or at computers, inputting data day after day, are more likely to view their work as a means of self-preservation rather than self-expression. For all of us whose survival depends on submission to the daily grind, ‘work’ conjures a less romantic set of images. It calls to mind the sense of dread associated with words like ‘chore’, ‘travail’ or ‘burden’.

One study describes the modern call centre as an ‘electronic panopticon’ (Fernie and Metcalf, 2000), whereas another refers to the ‘assembly line in the head’ of the call centre worker, who always knows that the completion of one task will immediately be followed by the uptake of another (Taylor and Bain, 1999). In 2013, a public controversy emerged around the working conditions of warehouse staff (or ‘pickers’) for the online megastore Amazon, where handheld computers are used to hold low-wage workers to unreasonably strict time limits as they trawl the vast warehouses, scanning and gathering orders. An undercover reporter writes: ‘We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves’ (BBC News, 2013).


pages: 104 words: 34,784

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Middle-class consumption is a complicated thing, but crucial to understanding how this class self-identifies. When I moved to Toronto in 2000, the economy was booming. I was only a recent grad student with little job experience, however, so I started temping at a call centre. A giant call centre is not unlike a factory floor, and for a little while, at least, Toronto felt a bit more like Windsor (in fact, one of the ways Windsor has replaced its manufacturing sector is with much lower-paying call centres, a shift from an industrial economy to a service-oriented one). After four months of searching, however, I finally got a proper, permanent job as a fundraising researcher at a large non-profit organization.

It is curious why we do not speak more of the service class as the working class. Though not as physical as working in the Ford foundry, the punch-in/punch-out life is much the same, as is the lack of agency. Having worked in both sectors, from the factory floor at Hiram Walker to the mall record store (and even my first Toronto job temping at a call centre), I see much in common with the relationship to work (being told what to do) and a wider class sensibility (feeling as if somebody else controls your destiny). As for lifestyle, Florida argues the creative class is not just a blending of bourgeois and bohemian values, as outlined in David Brook’s 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, an early look at what would inform Florida’s creative class, but transcends those two categories completely.


pages: 367 words: 108,689

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

Re-engineering meant that organizations no longer needed to be the great employers of the middle classes, cluttering up their middle ranks with careful, thrifty, sensible and educated types to communicate between the different corporate layers. This was also the defining shift in the class system — the economy, like the corporations, is now run by a tiny ruling elite, with a handful of well-paid managers who do their bidding, and a vast and detachable underclass of drones who man the software and call centres. The middle classes have largely migrated to the public sector, the creative world and the entrepreneurial world of small business. When the Independent on Sunday can talk about the ‘casualisation of the middle classes in full swing’, that means many things, but most of all perhaps it has meant the end of the traditional middle-class occupational pension.[2] Here is the shift in a nutshell.

They are looking for a place where their child will find others like them, somewhere where they can know the teachers, where they won’t be bullied or threatened because they know things. Somewhere without X-ray machines for knives, with some respect for culture, history and music — and which won’t just train their children to be an online or call-centre drone. And about these things the league tables will tell them absolutely nothing. So the core of the great panic is not actually snobbery. It is a search for shared values and it is a fear, as much as anything else, of violence, of knives, security guards and hyper-masculine aggression.[27] ‘Stick the name of the school into Google along with words such as “vandalism”, “knives”, “arson” and “metal detector”,’ advised Andrew Pawson with unnecessary relish, but he has pinpointed the fear accurately.

We are now in a post-Fordist world. The robots have taken over the factories — the masses don’t work there any more — but we are definitely not in a ‘post-Taylor’ one. You can see his ideas, breaking every task down into units, measuring how long they take and setting targets for workers to meet, in call centres, NHS hospitals, probation offices and the battery of statistics by which public services are now run all over the Western world. Taylor died of flu in 1915, broken and embittered by his treatment at the hands of congressmen inquiring into his methods. Ironically, he died winding his watch, the symbol of his legacy.


pages: 401 words: 93,256

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

Here are some recent butterfly effect discoveries, from my own experience: A website adds a single extra option to its checkout procedure – and increases sales by $300m per year. An airline changes the way in which flights are presented – and sells £8m more of premium seating per year. A software company makes a seemingly inconsequential change to call-centre procedure – and retains business worth several million pounds. A publisher adds four trivial words to a call-centre script – and doubles the rate of conversion to sales. A fast-food outlet increases sales of a product by putting the price . . . up. All these disproportionate successes were, to an economist, entirely illogical. All of them worked.

Define something narrowly, automate or streamline it – or remove it entirely – then regard the savings as profit. Is this, too, explained by argumentative thinking, where we would rather win an argument than be right? I rang a company’s call centre the other day, and the experience was exemplary: helpful, knowledgeable and charming. The firm was a client of ours, so I asked them what they did to make their telephone operators so good. The response was unexpected: ‘To be perfectly honest, we probably overpay them.’ The call centre was 20 miles from a large city; local staff, rather than travelling for an hour each day to find reasonably paid work, stayed for decades and became highly proficient.

However, modern capitalism dictates that it will only be a matter of time before some beady-eyed consultants pitch up at a board meeting with a PowerPoint presentation entitled ‘Rightsizing Customer Service Costs Through Offshoring and Resource Management’, or something similar. Within months, either the entire operation will be moved abroad, or the once-happy call centre staff will be forced on to zero-hour contracts. Soon nobody will phone to place orders because they won’t be able to understand a word they are saying, but that won’t matter when the company presents its quarterly earnings to analysts and one chart contains the bullet point: ‘Labour cost reduction through call centre relocation/downsizing’. Today, the principal activity of any publicly held company is rarely the creation of products to satisfy a market need.


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Nevertheless, those who are dependent on others for allocating them to tasks over which they have little control are at greater risk of falling into the precariat. Another group linked to the precariat is the growing army in call centres. These are ubiquitous, a sinister symbol of globalisation, electronic life and alienated labour. In 2008, the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 presented a television documentary called ‘Phone Rage’, highlighting the mutual misunderstandings between young call-centre staff and angry customers. According to the programme, on average, people in the United Kingdom spent a full day each year talking to call centres, and the amount of time was rising. Then there are interns, a peculiarly modern phenomenon whereby recent graduates, current students or even pre-students work for a while for little or no pay, doing petty office jobs.

Ackerman, Bruce 180 Adecco 33, 49 agency 167–70 Agrarian Justice (Paine) 173 Aguiar, Mark 128 Alemanno, Gianni 149 Alexander, Douglas 145 alienation 19–24 alternative medicine 70 altruism 181 anger 19–24, 168 anomie 19–24, 64 Ant Tribe 73 anxiety 19–24, 155, 178 Anzalone, John 152 apprenticeships 10b, 23, 60, 70, 72–3, 131 architecture of choice 133, 139, 140, 142 Arendt, Hannah 117, 163–4 Arizona law SB1070 93, 97–8 associational freedom 167–70 associations, occupational 169–70 asylum seekers 92–3, 94, 96, 149, 158 Atos Origin 166–7 atypical labour 32, 41 Australia 39, 90, 103 Austria 150 Axelrod, David 152 baby boomers 66–7, 74 bag lady syndrome 63, 84 banausoi 13, 117 basic income 171–8, 181 Bauerlein, Mark 69 BBVA 50 Beck, Glen 151 Belgium 39 benefits 11–12, 33, 174 and the disabled 87 health care 51 unemployment 45–8, 99, 104 and wages 41–2 women and 62 Bentham, Jeremy 132–3 Berlusconi, Silvio 69, 183 on immigrants 4, 97, 148–9 BIEN (Basic Income European Network/ Basic Income Earth Network) 172 Birthright Lottery, The (Schachar) 177 Blair, Tony 135, 158, 179 Blinder, Alan 163 boredom 19, 141 Bosson, Eric 97 brain 18, 85 Brazil 182 breadwinners 41, 59, 62, 64 British Airways 50 Brown, Gordon 103 Bryceson, D.B. 21 Buffett, Warren 78 call centres 16, 169 Cameron, David 139, 169, 179 Can They do That? (Maltby) 138 Canada 79, 114 capital funds 176–7 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman) 156 care work 61, 86, 125–6 careers, leisure 129 cash transfers 177 see also conditional cash transfers (CCTs) CCTs (conditional cash transfer schemes) 140 Cerasa, Claudio 149 Channel 4, call centre programme (UK) 16 charities 53 children, care for 125 China 28 and contractualisation 37 criminalisation 88 deliberative democracy 181 education 73 immigrants to Italy 4–5 invasion of privacy 135 migrants 96, 106–9, 109–10 old agers 83 191 192 INDEX China 28 (Continued) Shenzhen 133, 137 and time 115 wages 43 youth 76 see also Chindia China Plus One 28 Chindia 26, 27–9, 83 see also China Chrysler Group LLC 43 circulants 90, 92 Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission (US) 152–3 civil rights 14, 94 class, social 6–8, 66–7 Coase, Ronald 29 Cohen, Daniel 57, 66, 69 collaborative bargaining 168 collective attention deficit syndrome 127 commodification of companies 29–31 of education 67–72 and globalisation 26 labour 161–2 of management 40 of politics 148–53 re- 41–2 conditional cash transfers (CCTs) 140 see also cash transfers conditionality 140, 175 and basic income 172–3 and workfare 143–5, 166–7 connectivity, and youth 127 contract status 35, 36, 37, 44, 51, 61 contractors, independent/ dependent 15–16 contractualisation 37 counselling for stress 126 Crawford, Matthew 70 credit 44 crime 5, 129–30 criminalisation 14, 145, 146 crystallised intelligence 85 cultural rights 14 de Tocqueville, Alexis 145 de-industrialisation 5, 37–8 debt, and youth 73–4 Delfanti, Alessandro 78 deliberative democracy 180–1, 182 denizens 14, 93–102, 105, 113, 117, 157–8 Denmark 150 dependent/independent contractors 15–16 deskilling 17, 33, 40, 124 developing countries 12, 27, 60, 65, 105–9 disabled people 86–7, 89, 170 discrimination age 84–5 disability 81 gender 60, 123 genetic profiling 136–7 and migrants 99, 101–2 disengagement, political 24 distance working 38, 53 dole (UK) 45 Duncan Smith, Iain 143 Durkeim, Emile 20 economic security 157, 171, 173–6 The Economist 17–18, 33, 52, 137 economy, shadow 56–7 education 10, 67–73, 135–6, 159–60 Ehrenreich, Barbara 21, 170–1 elites 7, 22, 24, 40, 50 criminality 152 and democracy 181 ethics 165 Italian 148 and the Tea Party (US) 151 empathy 22–3, 137 employment agencies 33 employment security 10b, 11, 17, 36, 51, 117 Endarkenment 70 Enlightenment 24, 70 enterprise benefits 11, 12 environmental issues 167 environmental refugees 93 Esping-Andersen, G. 41 ethics 23–4, 121–2, 165 ethnic minorities 86 EuroMayDay 1, 2, 3, 167 European Union (EU) 2, 39, 146, 147 and migrants 97, 103, 105 and pensions 80 see also individual countries export processing zones 105–6 Facebook 127, 134, 135 failed occupationality 21 INDEX family 27, 44, 60, 65, 126 fear, used for control 32 fictitious decommodification 41 financial capital 171, 176–7 financial sector jobs 39–40 financial shock 2008-9 see Great Recession Financial Times 44, 55, 121, 155 firing workers 31–2 Fishkin, James 180 Fletcher, Bill 170–1 flexibility 18 labour 23–4, 31–6, 53, 60, 61, 65 labour market 6, 120–1, 170 Ford Motor Company 42, 43 Foucault, Michel 88, 133 Foxconn 28–9, 43, 105, 137 see also Shenzhen France criminalisation 88 de-industrialisation 38 education 69 leisure 129 migrants 95, 97, 101–2, 114 neo-fascism 149 and old agers 85 pensions 79 shadow economy 56 Telecom 11 youth 65–6 fraternity 12, 22, 155 freedom 155, 167–70, 172 freelance see temporary employment freeter unions 9 Friedman, Milton 39, 156 functional flexibility 36–8, 52 furloughs 36, 50 gays 63–4 General Motors (GM) 42, 43, 54 genetic profiling 136 Germany 9 de-industrialisation 38 disengagement with jobs 24 migrants 91, 95, 100–1, 114 pensions 79 shadow economy 56 temporary employment 15, 35 wages 40 and women 62 youth and apprenticeships 72–3 193 Glen Beck’s Common Sense (Beck) 151 Global Transformation 26, 27–31, 91, 115 globalisation 5–7, 27–31, 116, 148 and commodification 26 and criminalisation 87–8 and temporary employment 34 Google Street View 134 Gorz, Andre 7 grants, leisure 180–2 Great Recession 4, 49–51, 63, 176 and education 71 and migrants 102 and old agers 82 and pensions 80 and youth 77–8 Greece 52, 56, 117, 181 grinners/groaners 59, 83–4 Habermas, Jürgen 179 Haidt, J. 23 Hamburg (Germany) 3 happiness 140–1, 162 Hardt, M. 130 Hayek, Friedrich 39 health 51, 70, 120, 126 Hitachi 84 Hobsbawm, Eric 3 hormones 136 hot desking 53 Howker, Ed 65 Human Rights Watch 106 Hungary 149 Hurst, Erik 128 Hyatt Hotels 32 IBM 38, 137 identity 9 digital 134–5 work-based 12, 15–16, 23, 158–9, 163 Ignatieff, Michael 88 illegal migrants 96–8 In Praise of Idleness (Russell) 141, 161 income security 10b, 30, 40, 44 independent/dependent contractors 15–16 India 50, 83, 112, 140 see also Chindia individuality 3, 19, 122 informal status 6–7, 57, 60, 96, 119 inshored/offshored labour 30, 36, 37 194 INDEX International Herald Tribune 21 internet 18, 127, 139, 180, 181 surveillance 134–5, 138 interns 16, 36, 75–6 invasion of privacy 133–5, 167 Ireland 52–3, 77 isolation of workers 38 Italy education 69 neo-fascism 148–9 pensions 79 Prato 4–5 and the public sector 52, 53 shadow economy 56 and temporary employment 34 youth 64 Japan 2, 30 and Chinese migrants 110 commodification of companies 30 and migrants 102, 103 multiple job holding 119–20 neo-fascism 152 pensions 80 salariat 17 subsidies 84 and temporary employment 15, 32–3, 34–5, 41 and youth 66, 74, 76, 77 job security 10b, 11, 36–8 Kellaway, Lucy 83–4 Keynes, John Maynard 161 Kierkegaard, Søren 155 Klein, Naomi 148 knowledge 32, 117, 124–5, 171 labour 13, 115, 161–2 labour brokers 33–4, 49, 110, 111, 167, 168 labour flexibility 23–4, 31–45 labour intensification 119–20 labour market flexibility 6 labour security 10–11, 10b, 31 Laos 112 lay-offs see furloughs Lee Changshik 21 legal knowledge 124–5 legal processing 50 Legal Services Act of 2007 (UK) (Tesco Law) 40 leisure 13, 128–30 see also play lesbians 63–4 Liberal Republic, The 181 Lloyds Banking Group 50–1 localism 181–2 long-term migrants 100–2 loyalty 53, 58, 74–5 McDonald’s 33 McNealy, Scott 69 Malik, Shiv 65 Maltby, Lewis 138 Manafort, Paul 152 management, commodification of 40 Mandelson, Peter, Baron 68 Maroni, Roberto 97 marriage 64–5, 92 Martin, Paul 141 Marx, Karl 161 masculinity, role models for youth 63–5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 68–9 Mayhew, Les 81 Mead, Lawrence 143 mergers, triangular 30 Mexico 91 Middle East 109 migrants 2, 13–14, 25, 90–3, 145–6 and basic income 172 and conditionality 144 denizens 93–102, 157–8 government organised 109–13 internal 105–9 and queuing systems 103–5 and recession 102–3 Mill, John Stuart 160 Morris, William 160, 161 Morrison, Catriona 127 multinational corporations 28, 92 multitasking 19, 126–7 National Broadband Plan 134 near-sourcing/shoring 36 Negri, A. 130 neo-fascism 25, 147–53, 159, 175, 183 Netherlands 39, 79, 114, 149–50 New Thought Movement 21 New York Times 69, 119 News from Nowhere (Morris) 161 Niemöller, Martin 182 INDEX non-refoulement 93 Nudge (Sunstein/Thaler) 138–9 nudging 138–40, 155–6, 165, 167, 172, 178, 182 numerical flexibility 31–6 Obama, Barack 73, 138–9, 147, 148 Observer, The 20 occupations associations of 169–70 dismantling of 38–40 freedom in 162–4 obsolescence in 124 offshored/inshored labour 30, 36, 37 old agers 59, 79– 86, 89 old-age dependency ratio 80–1 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 27 origins of the precariat 1–5 outsourcing 29, 30, 33, 36, 37, 49 Paine, Thomas 173 panopticon society 132–40, 142–3 Parent Motivators (UK) 139–40 part-time employment 15, 35–6, 51, 61, 82 Pasona 33 paternalism 17, 29, 137, 153, 178, 182 nudging 138–40, 155–6, 165, 167, 172, 178, 182 pensions 42, 51, 52, 76–7, 79–81, 84–6 PepsiCo 137 personal deportment skills 123 Philippines 109 Phoenix, University of 71 Pigou, Arthur 117, 125 play 13, 115, 117, 128, 141 pleasure 141 Polanyi, K. 163, 169 political engagement/disengagement 24, 147 Portugal 52, 56 positive thinking 21, 86 Prato (Italy) 4–5 precariat (definition) 6, 7–13 precariato 9 precariatisation 16–18 precarity traps 48–9, 73–5, 114, 129, 144, 178 pride 22 prisoners 112, 146 privacy, invasion of 133–5, 167 private benefits 11 productivity, and old age 85 proficians 7–8, 15, 164 proletariat 7 protectionism 27, 54 public sector 51–4 qualifications 95 queuing systems 103–5 racism 97–8, 101, 114, 149 Randstad 49 re-commodification 41–2 recession see Great Recession refugees 92, 93, 96 regulation 23, 26, 39–40, 84, 171 Reimagining Socialism (Ehrenreich/ Fletcher) 170–1 remote working 38, 53 rentier economies 27, 176 representation security 10b, 31 retirement 42, 80–3 rights 14, 94, 145, 163, 164–5, 169 see also denizens risk management 178 Robin Hood gang 3 role models for youth 63–5 Roma 97, 149 Rossington, John 100 Rothman, David 88 Russell, Bertrand 141, 161 Russell, Lucie 64 Russia 88, 115 salariat 7, 8, 14, 17, 32 Santelli, Rick 150 Sarkozy, Nicolas 69, 97, 149 Sarrazin, Thilo 101 Schachar, Ayelet 177 Schneider, Friedrich 56 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 71 seasonal migrants 98–100 security, economic 157, 171, 173–6 self-employment 15–16, 66, 82 self-esteem 21 self-exploitation 20, 122–3 self-production 11 self-regulation 23, 39 self-service 125 services 37–8, 63 195 196 INDEX Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure (Martin) 141 sex services 63 sexism, reverse 123 shadow economy 56–7, 91 Shenzhen (China) 133, 137 see also Foxconn Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford) 70 short-time compensation schemes 55–6 side-jobs 119–20 skill reproduction security 10b skills 157, 176 development of 30, 31, 40 personal deportment 123 tertiary 121–4 Skirbekk, Vegard 85 Smarsh 138 Smile or Die (Ehrenreich) 21 Smith, Adam 71 snowball theory 78 social class 6–8, 66–7 social factory 38, 118, 132 social income 11–12, 40–5, 51, 66 social insurance 22, 104 social memory 12, 23, 129 social mobility 23, 57–8, 175 social networking sites 137 see also Facebook social rights 14 social worth 21 sousveillance 134, 135 South Africa, and migrants 91, 98 South Korea 15, 55, 61, 75 space, public 171, 179–80 Spain BBVA 50 migrants 94 and migrants 102 pensions 79 and the public sector 53 shadow economy 55–6 temporary employment 35 Speenhamland system 55, 143 staffing agencies 33–4, 49, 110, 111, 167, 168 state benefits 11, 12 status 8, 21, 32–3, 94 status discord 10 status frustration 10, 21, 63, 67, 77, 78, 79, 89, 114, 123, 160 stress 19, 126, 141, 141–3 subsidies 44, 54–6, 83–6, 176 suicide, work-related 11, 29, 58, 105 Summers, Larry 148 Sun Microsystems 69 Sunstein, Cass 138–9 surveillance 132–6, 153, 167 see also sousveillance Suzuki, Kensuke 152 Sweden 68, 110–11, 135, 149 symbols 3 Taking of Rome, The (Cerasa) 149 taxes 26 and citizenship 177 France 85 and subsidies 54–5 Tobin 177 United States (US) 180–1 Tea Party movement 150–1 technology and the brain 18 internet 180, 181 surveillance 132–6 teleworking 38 temporary agencies 33–4, 49, 110, 111, 167, 168 temporary employment 14–15, 49 associations for 170 Japan 9 and numerical flexibility 32–6 and old agers 82 and the public sector 51 and youth 65 tertiarisation 37–8 tertiary skill 121–4 tertiary time 116, 119 tertiary workplace 116 Tesco Law (UK) 40 Thailand, migrants 106 Thaler, Richard 138–9 therapy state 141–3, 153 Thompson, E.P. 115 time 115–16, 163, 171, 178 labour intensification 119–20 tertiary 116, 119 use of 38 work-for-labour 120–1 titles of jobs 17–18 Tobin taxes 177 Tomkins, Richard 70 towns, company 137 INDEX toy-factory incident 108–9 trade unions 1, 2, 5, 10b, 26, 31, 168 and migration 91 public sector 51 and youth 77–8 see also yellow unions training 121–4 triangular mergers 30 triangulation 34 Trumka, Richard 78 trust relationships 8–9, 22 Twitter 127 Ukraine 152 undocumented migrants 96–8 unemployment 145 benefits 45–8, 99, 104 insurance for 175 voluntary 122 youth after recession 77 uniforms, to distinguish employment status 32–3 unions freeter 9 yellow 33 see also trade United Kingdom (UK) 102–3 benefit system 173 Channel 4 call centre programme 16 company loyalty 74–5 conditionality 143–5, 166–7 criminalisation 88 de-industrialisation 38 disabled people 170 and education 67, 70, 71 financial shock (2008-9) 49–51, 71 labour intensification 119 Legal Services Act (2007) (Tesco Law) 40 leisure 129 migrants 91, 95, 99, 103–5, 114, 146 neo-fascism 150 paternalism 139–40 pensions 43, 80 and the public sector 53 public spaces 179 and regulation of occupational bodies 39 shadow economy 56 and social mobility 56–8 and subsidies 55 197 temporary employment 15, 34, 35 as a therapy state 142 women 61–2, 162 workplace discipline 138 youth 64, 76 United States (US) care for children 125 criminalisation 88 education 69, 70–1, 73, 135–6 ethnic minorities 86 financial shock (2008-9) 49–50 migrants 90–1, 93, 94, 97, 103, 114 neo-fascism 150–1, 152–3 old agers 82–3, 85 pensions 42, 52, 80 public sector 52 regulation of occupational bodies 39 social mobility in 57–8 subsidies 55, 56 taxes 180–1 temporary employment 34, 35 volunteer work 163 wages and benefits 42 women 62, 63 youth 75, 77 universalism 155, 157, 162, 180 University of the People 69 University of Phoenix 71 unpaid furloughs 36 unpaid leave 50 uptitling 17–18 utilitarianism 88, 132, 141, 154 value of support 11 Vietnam 28, 111–12 voluntary unemployment 122 volunteer work 86, 163–4 voting 146, 147, 181 Wacquant, L. 132 wages 8, 11 and benefits 41–2 family 60 flexibility 40–5, 66 individualised 60 and migrants 103 and temporary workers 32, 33 Vietnam 28 see also basic income Waiting for Superman (documentary) 69 Wall Street Journal 35, 163 198 INDEX Walmart 33, 107 Wandering Tribe 73 Weber, Max 7 welfare claimants 245 welfare systems 44 Wen Jiabao 105 Whitehead, Alfred North 160 Williams, Rob 62 wiretapping 135 women 60–5 and care work 125–6 CCTs (conditional cash transfer schemes) 140 labour commodification 161 and migration 92 multiple jobholding 119–20 reverse sexism 123 work 115, 117, 160–1 and identity 158–9 and labour 13 right to 145, 163, 164–5 security 10b work-for-labour 120–1, 178 work-for-reproduction 124–7 work–life balance 118 worker cooperatives 168–70 workfare 143–5, 166–7 working class 7, 8 workplace 116, 122, 130, 131 discipline 136–8 tertiary 116 Yanukovich, Victor 152 yellow unions 33 youth 59, 65–7, 89, 156 commodification of education 67–72 connectivity 127 and criminality 129–30 generational tension 76–7 and old agers 85 precarity traps 73–5 prospects for the future 78–9 and role models 63–5 streaming education 72–3 zero-hour contracts 36

Challenges to be overcome would include transparency, overtendering, accountability once contracts were negotiated, and governance of rules on distribution of income, labour opportunities and internal promotions. Problems would also arise in jurisdiction and relations with other services. How would a service deal with labour-saving technical change? On launching the idea in February 2010, Cameron cited examples such as call centres, social work, community health and nursing teams, hospital pathology departments, and rehabilitation and education services in prisons. This list prompts several questions. How large should the group be that is designated as a ‘worker cooperative’? If all National Health Service hospitals in a local authority area were selected as a group, problems would arise in determining what share of income would go to groups with widely different earnings and technical skills.


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Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Aneesh, Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); J. K. Tina Basi, Women, Identity and India’s Call Centre Industry (London: Routledge, 2009); Mahuya Pal and Patrice Buzzanell, “The Indian Call Center Experience: A Case Study in Changing Discourses of Identity, Identification, and Career in a Global Context,” Journal of Business Communication 45, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 31–60, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021943607309348; Sumita Raghuram, “Identities on Call: Impact of Impression Management on Indian Call Center Agents,” Human Relations 66, no. 11 (November 1, 2013): 1471–96, https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726713481069.

Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. Poster, Winifred R. “Hidden Sides of the Credit Economy: Emotions, Outsourcing, and Indian Call Centers.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 54, no. 3 (June 2013): 205–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020715213501823. Prassl, Jeremias. Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2018. Raghuram, Sumita. “Identities on Call: Impact of Impression Management on Indian Call Center Agents.” Human Relations 66, no. 11 (November 1, 2013): 1471–96. http://doi.org/10.1177/0018726713481069. Reich, Robert.

New York: ACM, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453. Barowy, Daniel W., Charlie Curtsinger, Emery D. Berger, and Andrew McGregor. “AutoMan: A Platform for Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation.” Communications of the ACM 59, no. 6 (June 2016): 102–109. https://doi.org/10.1145/2927928. Basi, J. K. Tina. Women, Identity and India’s Call Centre Industry. London: Routledge, 2009. Battistoni, Alyssa. “The False Promise of Universal Basic Income.” Dissent, Spring 2017. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/false-promise-universal-basic-income-andy-stern-ruger-bregman. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S.


There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

Its simplicity makes it a tempting crutch for any politician who is feeling freaked out by the complexities of running a country full of real sentient people and is looking for a way to reduce their anxiety. There is information in GDP but no simple link to good and bad. Learning from call centre metrics disasters Twenty years ago, when call centres were a newish phenomenon, I spent some time training some of their managers in Sheffield. Their biggest problem was that staff kept leaving. After just a few years they were getting to the point where they had burned a hole through the population of the city; everyone who might possibly apply for a job with them had already worked for them, hated it and left.

For many, this might sound too obvious to be worth writing down, but all too often the values behind ideas are not made explicit even though the implications are usually enormous for economics, food policy, climate policy and just about everything else you can think of for thriving in the Anthropocene. To be very clear, the same principle of inherent equal value of all human beings is universal. It applies to all world leaders, purveyors of both real and fake news, tireless aid workers, left wingers, right wingers, billionaires, paupers, your own kids, other people’s kids and even the call centre employee who rings you when you are having dinner with your family to try to persuade you to sue for an accident that never even happened. A person’s inherent worth is independent of their circumstances or the choices they have made in their lives or have had made for them. As far as other life forms go, they too deserve a place – because of their own sentient experience, not just for the practical reason that humans need them for food and medicine.

Nor are jobs the only ways of meeting the criteria. Useful things can be done by people without pay being necessary or appropriate. Fulfilling activities don’t require payment either and money can be distributed through a myriad of payment and tax mechanisms. Here are some examples. If you work in a call centre, cold calling people to try to persuade them to sue someone else 152 6 PEOPLE AND WORK for an accident they probably never even had, you probably hate your job, not least because you understand that its net impact on the world is negative. You and the rest of the world would be better off if we asked you not to go to work and paid you the same money anyway.


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The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Open-plan and lonely A space with no dividing walls or cubicles, workers sitting at long rows of desks, pecking away at their keyboards, all breathing in the same recycled air: welcome to the open-plan office. In recent times most of the concern about open-plan offices has centred, understandably, on their biohazardous nature. A study conducted by Korea’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracked a coronavirus outbreak at a call centre in Seoul in February 2020, showed how within just over two weeks of the first worker becoming infected more than ninety others who worked on the same open-plan office floor also tested positive for Covid-19.13 But it’s not just our physical health that this design choice endangers. One of the reasons so many office workers feel alienated from each other is because they spend their days in large, open-plan layouts.

Even simple measures like providing a cosy room or outdoor space with a long communal table, or team leaders ordering takeout food in a conference room or organising group trips to a nearby lunch spot can make a difference.57 More than anything, clear messaging from management to staff that a proper lunch break is not only permissible but actively encouraged will create conditions by which the long, primal tradition of eating together becomes a regular part of working life again. Just taking a break at the same time as other employees, whether for lunch or at another time, can make a big difference, for both morale and productivity. When MIT professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland conducted a detailed study of a US bank’s call centre, he found that the most productive teams were those who talked to each other the most outside of formal meetings, with face-to-face interactions being the most valuable. So he advised the centre’s manager to revise the employees’ coffee-break schedule to ensure that everyone on a team could take their break at the same time and thereby have an opportunity to socialise with their teammates away from their workstations.

Not only did the employees feel happier but the average handling time per call – a key metric of success in that sector – fell by one-fifth amongst lower performing teams and around 8% overall. Interspersed with their social chat it turned out employees also shared effective work-related tips and hacks. As a result, the bank is now implementing this more aligned break schedule across all ten of its call centres, a shift in strategy that will impact 25,000 employees and is expected to result in $15 million of productivity gains as well as improved employee morale. Already where this simple change in approach has been tried, employee satisfaction has risen in some cases by more than 10%.58 Creating opportunities for informal socialising whilst social distancing is still required is of course a real challenge.


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Branding Your Business: Promoting Your Business, Attracting Customers and Standing Out in the Market Place by James Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, market design, Nelson Mandela, Pepsi Challenge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, the market place

More direct mail is going straight in the waste-paper basket than ever before, and if traditional selling was only ever a ‘numbers game’, without a brand for support, its days are definitely numbered. Even the rise of technology-based customer care approaches, such as the once-hailed customer relationship management (CRM) systems, call centres and the like, have done little to aid business development. (Let’s face it. When you’re number 23 in a callwaiting queue and have been held there for 20 minutes, occasionally spoken to by some distorted, pre-recorded, unemotional voice telling you that ‘your call is important to us’, you get the feeling that someone somewhere has 4 Branding your business completely lost the plot, and has thrown any concept of building a strong brand out of the window.)

And keep the conversation centred around the brand, not yourself. Include your company name as close to the beginning of the conversation as you can, then utilise appropriate key words or phrases from your Brand Lexicon often. This will give the caller memory cues to keep the brand alive throughout the discussions. For example, if you contact Disney’s call centre, the conversation they’ll have with you will be replete with multiple uses of words like ‘magic’ and phrases such as ‘the magic of Disney’ and ‘magical kingdom’. Chances are, you won’t get off the phone without the word ‘magic’ still in your memory, albeit short-term. But put this together with the other experiences of ‘Disney magic’ you’ll encounter at their parks and that place in long-term memory is almost assured. 118 Making sense of the senses Fifteen customer service no-nos By Monte Enbysk, lead editor for the microsoft.com network.

Your employees refuse or forget to use the words ‘please’, ‘thank you’ or ‘you’re welcome’. (Please use these words generously, thank you.) 9. Your employees hold side conversations with friends or each other while talking to customers on the phone, or they make personal calls on cell phones in your call centre. (Don’t do either of these.) 10. Your employees seem incapable of offering more than oneword answers. (One-word answers come across as rude and uncaring.) 11. Your employees do provide more than one-word answers, but a lot of the words are grounded in company or industry jargon that many customers don’t understand.


pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Herbert Morrison’s famous rejection of Britain playing a role in the embryonic European Union (a rejection shared by most of the giants of that monumental government) on the grounds that the ‘Durham miners wouldn’t wear it’ stands as a reminder of the political power of manufacturing.18 The fact that a town ‘made’ something and was famous for making something gave real pride to the people who worked in manufacturing, and to everyone who lived in that town. That kind of pride can’t come from call centres or distribution hubs; pride and rootedness doesn’t come from towns becoming dormitories for nearby cities. Connection with a manufacturing base emphasised dignity and skill and also provided employment that went well through the supply chain and well beyond the site of the industry itself. This helps explain the sheer economic and social devastation that followed the closure of industry in places like Consett.

This has combined with a rolling back of the gains in working conditions and a diminution in the bargaining power of labour versus capital. Working-class jobs have less esteem, fewer rights, less security and fewer avenues for progression than was the case many years ago. As alluded to earlier, in many towns, the great industrial giants of the past have been replaced with call centres, distribution hubs and a number of other jobs where there is precious little dignity and precious little community pride. Many jobs are low paid and precarious, with over three-quarters of all workers feeling more anxiety and insecurity in their work than they did a generation ago. James Bloodworth has told of how many workers in distribution centres are treated with utmost suspicion, are given tags to monitor their movement and are reluctant to even have toilet breaks for fear of missing their ‘targets’.

This requires reindustrialisation, strategic government investment, town centre revival and, just as importantly, steps being taken to make sure that all workers are treated well. Even once millions of new, skilled jobs have been created as part of an industrial strategy, the economy will still need ‘elementary workers’, such as cleaners, call-centre staff, distribution centre staff, security guards and delivery workers, who deserve to be treated with decency and respect. Treating workers well shouldn’t be regarded as exceptional behaviour, or something for businesses to boast about; it should be regarded as the norm. It is inexcusable and unnecessary that some workers are stuck in the kind of insecure, unpredictable jobs that mean they can’t spend sufficient time with their families, in their communities or playing an active role in civic life.


pages: 350 words: 107,834

Halting State by Charles Stross

augmented reality, book value, Boris Johnson, call centre, forensic accounting, game design, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, Ken Thompson, lifelogging, Necker cube, no-fly zone, operational security, Potemkin village, RFID, Schrödinger's Cat, Vernor Vinge, zero day

You’re right about it sounding like a swoop and squat, and that medical claim is a classic. Medical confidentiality is a great blind for snipers, but we can poke a hole in it if there’s a fraud investigation in train. Now, Nationwide still have some human folks on the web in the Customer Retention and Abuse groups, and what you need to do is to get this escalated off the call-centre ladder until a human being sees it, then you need to hammer away.” “But how do I…?” You start checking off points on your fingertips. “You start by getting Sally to offer them her car’s black-box log. Once you know exactly where she was when the incident happened—the black-box GPS will tell you that—you tell them to serve a FOIA disclosure notice on the Highways Agency for their nearby camera footage—if they won’t listen at first, I’ll talk you through doing that yourself.

It’s a puzzler, but at least they’re not insisting you clear customs and immigration: Thank Brussels for something. The taxi ride to your hotel rubs in the fact that you’ve come to another country. It’s the old-fashioned kind of black cab, with a real human being behind the wheel instead of a webcam and a drone jockey in a call centre. Your driver manages to detour past a weird building, all non-Euclidean swoops and curves (he proudly declares it to be a parliament, even though it looks like it just arrived from Mars, then confides that it cost a science-fictional amount, confirming the Martian origins of its budget oversight process).

Then your tourist map twitches and rearranges itself in front of your eyes as the overloaded Galileo service catches up with you. “This is the, uh, Niddrie Malmaison. I wanted the West End one?” “Oh, reet. Ahcannaebemissingthe—” You blink at the subsequent stream of consonants interspersed with vowels that sound subtly wrong. Maybe you’d have been better off waiting for a call-centre–controlled limo. But evidently no reply is expected: The driver hits the pause button on his meter and engages the mysterious fifth wheel that allows taxis everywhere to turn on the spot. And you’re off again, into a bizarre grey maze of steep streets and steeper buildings, with or without battlements.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

In the twentieth century, developing countries lacking natural resources made economic progress mainly by selling the cheap labour of their unskilled workers. Today millions of Bangladeshis make a living by producing shirts and selling them to customers in the United States, while people in Bangalore earn their keep in call centres dealing with the complaints of American customers.26 Yet with the rise of AI, robots and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labour would become far less important. Instead of manufacturing a shirt in Dhaka and shipping it all the way to the US, you could buy the shirt’s code online from Amazon, and print it in New York.

The Zara and Prada stores on Fifth Avenue could be replaced by 3-D printing centres in Brooklyn, and some people might even have a printer at home. Simultaneously, instead of calling customer services in Bangalore to complain about your printer, you could talk with an AI representative in the Google cloud (whose accent and tone of voice are tailored to your preferences). The newly unemployed workers and call-centre operators in Dhaka and Bangalore don’t have the education necessary to switch to designing fashionable shirts or writing computer code – so how will they survive? If AI and 3-D printers indeed take over from the Bangladeshis and Bangalorians, the revenues that previously flowed to South Asia will now fill the coffers of a few tech-giants in California.

Instead of economic growth improving conditions all over the world, we might see immense new wealth created in hi-tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, while many developing countries collapse. Of course, some emerging economies – including India and Bangladesh – might advance fast enough to join the winning team. Given enough time, the children or grandchildren of textile workers and call-centre operators might well become the engineers and entrepreneurs who build and own the computers and 3-D printers. But the time to make such a transition is running out. In the past, cheap unskilled labour has served as a secure bridge across the global economic divide, and even if a country advanced slowly, it could expect to reach safety eventually.


Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth

call centre, dark matter, fear of failure, Google Earth, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, rolodex, unpaid internship

Bacon, my novel-in-progress, was the story of a priest who fell in love with a talking pig (I could already see the movie trailer: Gene Hackman in a dog collar, the back of a pig’s head in the foreground as they desperately embraced: ‘God help me, I love you!’). I’d been halfway through the thing for a few years now and needed to crack on if I was ever going to escape the call centre. I’d reduced my hours there to the minimum but I still spent every second pondering quiet desktop suicide. The previous week I’d been losing the will to live ten minutes into my shift when my boss came over and asked whether I had flu. ‘It’s just a cold,’ I said, stoically. He looked at the pile of congealed tissues on my desk.

The book was proving hard enough without the added worry of where it might or might not fit in the world, especially when I was yanked every day into a heinous, staticky place, a grey carpeted box of lies concerning credit cards. All that got me through was telling myself I was buying as well as biding my time, a dangling carrot for most people who worked in the call centre. There were musicians, playwrights, poets, novelists – all of us detesting every second in our headsets; all of us dreading the time someone would turn round and say: I’VE GOT MY BREAK! I’M OUT! SEE YOU LATER, LOSERS! GCSE English class. Tuesday afternoon. Me – thirteen, ginger, unstylishly myopic – navigating my way through Yeats’ ‘When You Are Old’ with rabid intent.

She picked her tea up from by her sandals and pointed to a mug down by the side of my chair. I picked up the tea and took a sip. Scaldy-hot. I took another sip. ‘So when did you leave the Red Room, then?’ I said when I could. ‘Not long after you. Four months, maybe five. Those 3 a.m. finishes! They’re a killer. What have you been up to since?’ ‘I work in a call centre.’ A pause, then: ‘See, much better hours, you know what I mean. Neil’s an accountant so we get something like a normal life at the evenings and weekends.’ ‘Well, my shifts are pretty unpredictable. It’s a twenty-four-hour service. Credit cards.’ I didn’t know why but it was almost as though part of me was enjoying making out I did the worst thing in the world.


pages: 280 words: 76,638

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

Translated into the jobs they were doing, this meant many things. Remember, these were professionals working in call centres in retail and hospitality. Such jobs often have a set of scripts that are used to deal with consumer enquiries. It is easy to stick to a script. It represents the default. But every now and again, you meet a situation that isn’t covered by the script, or where a fresh approach might work better. Do you just stick to what you have always done? Or do you find a new way of solving a problem, or selling an idea, or pleasing the customer? Those call centre workers who could step outside convention performed significantly better.

The start, however, has been highly promising, and gives researchers a chance to overcome the contradictions that have bedevilled the field. Above all, it articulates a vital truth that science itself can dispose us to forget – diversity matters. IV In the spring of 2010, Michael Housman, a labour economist, was working on a project to figure out why some call centre workers perform better than others. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find an answer. Nothing seemed to compute. He told me: I was working as Chief Analytics Officer for a firm that sells software to employers to help them recruit and retain staff. We had data on 50,000 people who had taken a 45-minute online job assessment and who were subsequently hired.

A different approach would be to adopt personalisation. This doesn’t consist of comparing different diets across the whole population, but adopts flexibility at the level of the individual. And, as Segal showed, this approach can lower the blood sugar response, leaving an individual with a significantly healthier diet. Now think of the call centre workers. Many organisations test different scripts, compare the results, perform statistical tests, and come to what seems like a scientific conclusion about which script is the best overall. But this often misses the benefits of flexibility. The Housman experiment shows that when workers sensibly deviate from a script, they often perform better.


pages: 320 words: 86,372

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself by Peter Fleming

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon tax, clockwatching, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, David Graeber, death from overwork, Etonian, future of work, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, neoliberal agenda, Parkinson's law, post-industrial society, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, shareholder value, social intelligence, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, transaction costs, wealth creators, working poor

This has been encouraged and facilitated by a broader agenda of flexible employment systems, the growth of subcontracting and the degradation of important employment rights and benefits that once regulated this practice (see Kreitzman, 1999; Aubenas, 2011). Cleaners, warehouse workers, caterers, security personnel, truck drivers, call-centre agents and many others now do their work in the middle of the night when the rest of us are asleep. Of course, Marx noted long ago that the attempt to render labour productive after the sun goes down represents a strong predisposition of the capitalist mode of production: The prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, acts only as a palliative.

We are not referring to a distinctive class or social category, although the destitute prefigures its form. For the impossibility lodged in every centre of this wrong whole is viral too. Its inflections are to be seen in the homeless, in the tearful bankers falling to earth from their high-rise prisons, in academics sacrificing themselves to the ‘bad deal’ they call a mortgage, in the call-centre employees who cannot go on, etc. The official silence concerning these unmanageable moments constantly throbs everywhere in the large cities of the capitalist order, a low and compulsive hum that troubles those who have learnt to listen to its message. A Negative Optics of Revolt After Deleuze, the planet of work is no figurative prison or straitjacket, but a set of impossible geometric lines that we must render obsolete so that their perpetual postponements and qualifications can be halted for good.

In the presence of a gruelling and often humiliating clash between managers and a disempowered employee, organizational bystanders frequently lose their nerve and volunteer important insights about the political alliances and factions that may be frustrating managerial objectives. A fourth reason for all this conflict is perhaps most central. An incident of disagreement, however minor and insignificant, offers management useful ammunition for justifiably abandoning employees in the future should the need arise. Many industries, especially call centres, customer services and retail, rely upon orchestrated conflict to eject workers on a regular basis, knowing that newcomers are less wise to the historical struggles within the firm and more pliant, until they too become a ‘problem’ and are themselves replaced. Indeed, these ‘green field’ strategies, in which a relentless cycle of hiring–firing–hiring is pursued, require a very combative approach by management, because most of the time employees simply want to be left alone to get on with the job.


pages: 335 words: 114,039

David Mitchell: Back Story by David Mitchell

British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, energy security, gentrification, Golden age of television, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Russell Brand, Stephen Fry

This wasn’t as unusual in 2002 as it is now. Nowadays I’d assume it was a survey or someone trying to sell me something. If I answered it, I’d expect that suspicious pause after I said hello which tells you that it’s from some poor sod in a call centre – a cold-call centre, in fact. Possibly a cold cold-call centre if it’s in the North-East, or a humid cold-call centre if it’s the subcontinent. The pause, I reckon, is because they’ve dialled a dozen, or a hundred, or maybe a thousand numbers at once, and it takes a beat for them to notice which ones have been answered. And of course it’s an infuriating pause because, not only is someone about to waste your time, you’re also expected to wait a few seconds until it’s convenient for them to start wasting it.

The battle, in my case, is to get off the phone politely and without having hung up on anyone. I feel that an element of my humanity will have been lost if I actually hang up while they’re still speaking. I try, by adopting a firm and patronising voice, to put an end to the call in good order. Of course it never works. The techniques drilled into the staff of a cold-call centre presumably include never stopping talking and never saying, ‘Okay, thanks, goodbye.’ I’m a slightly obsessive ‘goodbye’ sayer – I come away from parties with an unsettled feeling because I haven’t formally taken my leave of all the people I chatted to. I know that’s fine and people don’t expect it, but it feels like I’ve left lots of loose ends hanging.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

What seems sure is that the world that our grandchildren will work in will have very different organisations and very different life options than the ones I knew. Whether they will be better or nicer is another question. 4 THE WORKPLACE What? Where? Who? and How? WE HAVE TO contemplate a day when most factories – if they are still called that – are largely staffed by robots and call centres by talking computers, when cars, lorries and trains are increasingly driverless, when cooking is fully automated, the menu of your choice brought by robot to your table, when most shopping is online and entertainment on tap in your lounge or bedroom. Much of our lives will be organised by algorithms and computer-controlled systems.

But there is more to the job than the specified core, there is the dough around the jam, the empty space for new initiatives. Efficiency dislikes empty space so is tempted to prescribe what should happen in it, thereby pulling more into the core. In the extreme all the doughnut is core, every action is foreseen and prescribed, as is the case in many call centres where the operator is totally constrained by what they read on their screen. The next stage is to do away with the operator and leave it to the computer, thereby giving complete control to the centre but also ensuring that no unexpected or creative initiatives will be forthcoming. Efficiency will have killed individual creativity and initiative.

That may be expensive in the short term but, ultimately, trust is always cheaper than control. In a doughnut culture people are judged on the results, not on their methods, on their effectiveness rather than their efficiency. Efficiency should be the servant not the master. The new technologies can now work both ways. Technology can be used, as in some of those call centres, to eliminate discretion and increase control, or, by monitoring only results and by more disclosure of necessary data, it can facilitate individual initiative. Some business organisations take the doughnut model to extremes, effectively licensing individual units to run their own businesses, or to start new ones, for which they would need corporate approval if investment were needed.


Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

Your other source of intelligence should be data. There are various sources worth exploring. The web traffic data from your existing websites is a good place to start, not least to help identify how many of the thousands of web pages maintained by your organisation are visited by almost nobody. Data from call centres is also rich with insight about what your users are failing to find out from your websites. Gathering any unfiltered information you can get on user complaints is extremely powerful too, not least because it ensures that those with access to louder megaphones aren’t given a falsely high priority.

That e-petitions didn’t experience a familiar kind of public IT failure on a grand scale was itself enough for it to stand out as a success. To get a sense of just how visible a service will be, you will ideally need access to data. The web traffic logs on existing websites should give you some indication, as will call centre data. However, for completely greenfield services, there may be no historical numbers to work from. In these cases, you will have to calibrate potential visibility with a combination of your instincts and the amount of political attention the new idea is getting. Plan for worst-case scenarios, and run exercises that put the service through its paces.

Their goal should be to place this project in the same canon as those great designs; not by pastiche or homage, but by using the principles of good design adopted by the organisation’s pioneers. If they do this well enough, digital teams can unlock design patterns their organisation has never faced before. In the UK’s Ministry of Justice, a team redesigned the lasting power of attorney service following GDS’s design principles. Soon after a beta version was launched, the department’s call centre began getting more contacts. This was a puzzle and potentially a worry – the new service was supposed to reduce the number of people ringing up, not increase it. It turned out the spike in calls had been caused by users who wanted to praise the team on how smooth they found their experience. A positive feedback button was duly added to the online service.


pages: 252 words: 65,990

HWFG: Here We F**king Go by Chris McQueer

call centre, Donald Trump, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, sensible shoes, Social Justice Warrior

It was mental. Sammy the Crime Scene Cleaner Efter mah escapades in the sausage factory, ah went oan the brew fur a while. Ye ever been oan the brew? It’s a fuckin nightmare. Honestly, yer better aff workin. Cunt’s are oan yer case 24/7. Need tae apply fur aboot a million joabs every single day. Call centres, offices, shops, fuckin door tae door sales an aw that – everyhing. ‘Ahm clearly no qualified tae work in a jail,’ ah says tae mah designated advisor. ‘Ah mean, ahm no the biggest maist intimidatin cunt, um ah?’ ‘That’s beside the point,’ mah advisor says. ‘You have to apply or you’ll be sanctioned and lose your job seeker’s allowance.’

To impress Holly, Zack had claimed he was on the hunt for a job. After she came back from lunch, Beverly was stunned to see he was putting together a CV. Written in comic sans, using his email ZackFTQ1888@hotmail.com and only half a page long, but at least it was a start. Beverly stopped his email from sending when he fired his CV off to a local call centre and fixed it up herself. By the end of her shift, Zack had a first date, a first driving lesson and his first interview all lined up. An excellent day’s work, she thought. AND he’d only had two wanks. He would be fine without her after Friday, she reckoned. * * * On Thursday, Beverly could hardly believe her time with Zack was almost over.

Normally, she would set an alarm to wake him up but today she cancelled the alarm he’d set himself for 1:30pm. She then turned his phone on silent so he couldn’t hear when the instructor tried to phone him. Time to fuck up his employment hopes now. She drafted a short email in which she told the call centre’s recruitment manager that he had a voice like “a wee jessie” and to “shove the job up his arse” after picking up some Scots from watching Still Game. The she turned her attentions to poor Holly. She could do much better than Zack anyway. Your dug’s fuckin ugly she wrote and hit send. Eh fuck you then, cheeky arsehole Holly replied, then blocked him.


pages: 208 words: 67,582

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

Representatives of authority were themselves subject to the system, and could also be held accountable. These days, we live in a world where power is anonymous and cannot be localised, and therefore no longer exercises any moral authority. Much more importantly, it can also no longer be called to account. It is epitomised by the call centre with its endless menu options (‘Hi, I’m Vanessa, how can I help you?’) that never puts us through to the person who is responsible, for the very good reason that they don’t exist. The seat of power has been abandoned. There are no fathers anymore because the system has done away with symbolic authority figures.

Journalist Kaat Schaubroeck sums it up perfectly in the title of her book: Een verpletterend gevoel van verantwoordelijkheid: waarom ouders zich altijd schuldig voelen (A Crushing Sense of Responsibility: why parents always feel guilty). When they seek help for their children, whose disorders are also caused by the system, they find themselves at the mercy of the social-services call centre, which sends them from pillar to post. And this is the second explanation for the increasing demand for discipline: neo-liberal policies create a need for it by sweeping away symbolic authority and trust in such authority. As a result, everyone mistrusts everyone else, leading to yet more monitoring and measurement, and, despite all the slogans about deregulation and the ‘free’ market, to an endless proliferation of rules, regulations, and contracts.

Günter Wallraff is a journalist who occasionally goes undercover to find out exactly what it means, say, to be a member of an ethnic minority. He did the same thing as a worker right at the bottom of the social ladder, taking on jobs such as a baker in the Lidl supermarket chain and an operator in a call centre. He published his account in a book entitled Heerlijke nieuwe wereld (Brave New World). Besides the starvation wage (7.66 euros an hour before tax), Wallraff said that the hardest thing to bear was the loss of dignity, the feeling of no longer belonging. The system creates an underclass who regard themselves as failures, are ashamed, and seek to draw as little attention to themselves as possible.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

The silicon chip gets smaller; the add-on devices that once cluttered our workspaces – modems, hard drives, floppy disks – become smaller, scarcer, and then disappear. Proprietary software gets built by corporate IT departments and is then replaced by off-the-peg versions at one-tenth of the price. And soon, too, the IT departments disappear, to be replaced by call centres in Mumbai. The PC becomes the laptop. The laptop shrinks and gets more powerful but is superseded by the smartphone and the tablet. At first, this new technology was mapped on to the old structures of capitalism. In the 1990s, the folklore in IT was that the most expensive software – the enterprise resource package – ‘moulds like putty, sets like concrete’.

They have access to banking and insurance, are likely to own a TV, and usually live in small family groups, not the multigenerational families of the slum, or the solitude of the dormitory. Three-quarters of them work in service industries. The growth of service sector jobs in the developing world reflects both the natural evolution of the job mix under modern capitalism and a second round of offshoring, focused on call centres, IT departments and back-office functions. In short, the graph shows the limits of what offshoring can achieve. That growing wedge of $13-a-day workers is nudging into the income bracket of the poorest American workers. This means that the days of easy wins for firms offshoring their production are drawing to a close.

‘Capturing positive externalities,’ writes Moulier-Boutang, ‘becomes the number one problem of value.’48 In cognitive capitalism, the nature of work is transformed. Manual labour and industry don’t stop, but their place in the landscape changes. Because profit increasingly comes from capturing the free value generated by consumer behaviour, and because a society focused on mass consumption has to be constantly fed coffee, smiled at, serviced by call centres, the ‘factory’ in cognitive capitalism is the whole of society. For these theorists, ‘society as a factory’ is a crucial concept – vital to understanding not just the nature of exploitation but resistance. For a pair of Nike trainers to be worth $179.99 requires 465,000 workers in 107 factories across Vietnam, China and Indonesia to produce to the same exact standard.


pages: 280 words: 76,376

How to Write Your Will: The Complete Guide to Structuring Your Will, Inheritance Tax Planning, Probate and Administering an Estate by Marlene Garsia

Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, credit crunch, estate planning

The appropriate authorities in both England and Scotland have been extremely helpful, as they would be to any person seeking their assistance. There are significant changes under way not only with new laws but a change in the probate system and updating of excepted estates. Capital Taxes Office have introduced a call centre processing system although the initial contact is still to be made with your local Probate Registry. A proposed simplification in dealing with the Registries has been introduced. As an executor or proposed administrator you have to present yourself to the Registrar and swear that the information given is correct; in future ‘a statement of truth’ will replace the oath, although personal attendance will still be necessary.

The second part of the book deals with probate, what steps should be taken and when, in order to prove a will. If the sad task of winding up the estate of a close relative or friend is placed under your agreed control, you may need to seek advice. The best place to start is at the Personal Applications Department of your nearest Probate Registry or at one of its sub-registries. The new call centre on 0845 3020900 can be used for IHT queries and for forms, and also a website at www.courtservice.gov.uk. The Registrar and his colleagues in the Personal Applications Department in your area deal on a daily basis with all sorts of queries raised regarding probate. However, they cannot give legal advice.

In the proposal the current Registries and Sub-Registries were to be closed, leaving some six or so Probate Registries nationwide. To this end an 144 ■ How to Write Your Will amalgamation of telephone numbers/helpline numbers between the Capital Taxes Office and Probate is already in place and working. However, the call centre staff are only trained to deal with standard queries, and if it does not fall into this category your call will have to be transferred to another office. Happily, these proposals to reduce the number of offices have been abandoned and the nationwide network is to remain for the time being. Other positive proposals, such as a joint helpline, will also remain.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Research suggests that the colleagues we are most likely to email are the ones we regularly interact with face to face.15 Without the serendipitous encounters the office creates, communication along the informal linkages within an organization dries up. Highly routine office work may be somewhat shielded from these negative effects. One study of 16,000 call-centre workers in China, for example, noted a 4 per cent increase in calls per minute for workers operating at home.16 The authors of the study attributed this increase in productivity to a quieter environment at home compared with the office, though workers with children or other dependants may dispute that hypothesis.

Many poor countries blessed with attractive scenery or a warm climate will continue to benefit from tourists. But the jobs this sector creates tend to be relatively low paid, and many poor countries do not have the beaches of Thailand or the wildlife of Tanzania. Another option is to provide cheap call centres or clerical services such as payroll. Many of these highly routinized activities, however, are already being automated, with recent developments in generative artificial intelligence increasing the risk of replacement. A new consensus on migration could be one part of the solution. While many of the poorest countries of the world will continue to experience rapid population growth in the decades ahead, many rich countries – and some middle-income countries like China – are experiencing rapid ageing and will see their populations contract in the coming decades.

Index abortion here abstract mathematics here Achaemenid Empire here Adani, Gautam here agglomeration effects here agriculture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and carbon emissions here and disease here, here productivity here, here vertical farming here Ahmedabad here air-conditioning here, here airports here, here, here, here Albuquerque here Alexandria here Allen, Paul here Allen, Thomas here Altrincham here Amazon here, here, here Amazon rainforest here Amsterdam here Anatolia here Anderson, Benedict here Anheuser-Busch here antibiotics here, here, here Antonine Plague here Anyang here apartment conversions here, here Apple here, here, here Aristotle here Arizona State University here Arlington here Assyrian merchants here Athens, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Atlanta here, here Austin here, here, here automation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here axial precession here Baghdad, House of Wisdom here Baltimore here, here Bangalore here, here Bangkok here Bangladesh here, here, here, here Barlow, John Perry here Bauhaus here Beijing here, here Belmar redevelopment here Berkes, Enrico here Berlin here, here, here Berlin Wall, fall of here Bezos, Jeff here biological weapons here ‘biophilia’ here biospheres here bird flu here Birmingham here, here Black Death here, here, here Blake, William here Bloom, Nick here BMW here ‘bobo’ (bourgeois bohemian) here, here, here Boccaccio, Giovanni here Boeing here, here, here Bogota here Bologna here Bonfire of the Vanities here Borneo here Boston here, here, here Boston University here, here Brand, Stewart here Brazil here, here Brexit here, here, here Bristol here Britain broadcasting here deindustrialization here education here enclosure movement here foreign aid here high-speed rail here, here house prices here immigration here industrialization here, here infant mortality here ‘levelling up’ here life expectancy here mayoralties here per capita emissions here per capita incomes here remote working here social housing here Brixton riots here broadcasting here Bronze Age here, here, here, here bronze, and shift to iron here Brooks, David here Brynjolfsson, Eric here Burgess, Ernest here bushmeat here, here Byzantine Empire, fall of here Cairncross, Frances here Cairo here calendar, invention of here Cambridge, Massachusetts here Cambridge University here canals here, here, here ‘cancel culture’ here Cape Town here Catholic Church here C40 Cities partnership here Chadwick, Edwin here Chang’an (Xi’an) here, here, here, here Charles, Prince of Wales here charter cities here Chengdu here Chiba here Chicago here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here childbirth, average age at here childcare here, here, here, here, here China here ancient here, here, here, here call-centre workers here cereal production here civil strife here and Covid-19 pandemic here Cultural Revolution here definition of cities here economic liberalization here entry into WTO here Household Responsibility System here hukou system here One Child Policy here Open Coastal Cities here per capita emissions here rapid ageing here Special Economic Zones here technology here urbanization here China Towns here Chinese Communist Party here cholera here, here, here, here Chongqing here cities, definition of here Citigroup here city networks here civil wars here Cleveland here, here, here, here climate change here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here coastal cities here, here, here, here commuting here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Concentric Zone Model here Confucius here conspiracy theories here Constantinople here, here containerization here, here Copenhagen here, here Corinth here Cornwall here corruption here Coventry here, here covid-19 see pandemics crime rates here ‘cyberbalkanization’ here cycling here, here, here, here Damascus here Dark Ages here, here data science here de Soto, Hernando here deforestation here, here, here, here Delhi here Dell here Delphic oracle here democracy here, here, here Democratic Republic of Congo here, here, here, here, here, here Deng Xiaoping here dengue fever here Denmark here, here Detroit here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dhaka here, here, here, here, here Dharavi here Diana, Princess of Wales here diasporas here, here Dickens, Charles here district heating systems here Dresden here drought here, here, here, here, here, here, here Drucker, Peter here dual-income households here, here Dubai here, here, here Dunbar, Kevin here Düsseldorf here East Antarctic ice sheet here East China Sea here, here Easterly, William here Eastern Mediterranean here, here, here Ebola here Edinburgh here education here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here higher education here, here, here, here; see also universities Japanese school system here Egypt here, here Ancient here, here, here, here Ehrenhalt, Alan here electric vehicles (EVs) here Engels, Friedrich here Enlightenment here Epic of Gilgamesh here Erfurt here Ethiopia here, here Euripides here European Enlightenment here exchange rates here Facebook here, here, here fake news here famine here, here fertility rates here, here, here ‘15-minute city’ principle here Fischer, Claude here Fleming, Alexander here flooding here, here, here, here, here, here, here Florida, Richard here, here food shortages here Ford, Henry here, here foreign aid here fossil fuels here, here France here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Frankfurt here Franklin, Benjamin here Friedman, Thomas here, here Fryer, Roland here Fukuoka here, here Gaetani, Ruben here Galileo Galilei here Ganges River here Garden Cities here Garden of Eden here Gates, Bill here, here gay community here General Electric here General Motors here genetic engineering here gentrification here, here, here, here, here George, Andy here Germany here, here, here, here, here, here Gingrich, Newt here glaciers here Glasgow here Glass, Ruth here global financial crisis here, here, here global population, size of here globalization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Goldstein, Amy here Google here, here, here Goos, Maarten here Grant, Adam here Great Depression here, here Greece, Ancient here, here, here, here, here Griffith Observatory here Gropius, Walter here Gruen, Victor here Gulf Stream here Haiti here Hamburg here Hanseatic League here, here Harappa here, here Harry, Prince here Harvard University here hate speech here Haussmann, Baron here, here Hawaii here Hazlitt, William here healthcare here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here heatwaves here, here Hebei here Heckscher, Eli here Herodotus here Himalayas here Hippocrates here Hippodamus here Hittite Empire here HIV here, here Ho Chi Minh City here Holocene here, here, here homophily here Hong Kong here house prices here, here, here, here, here, here, here Houston here, here, here Howard, Ebenezer here Hudson River here Hugo, Victor here Hume, David here Hurricane Katrina here hybrid working, see remote and hybrid working ice melting here, here import substitution industrialization here InBev here India here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here fertility rates here Indonesia here, here Indus River here Indus Valley here, here, here inequality here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here infant and child mortality here, here, here, here influenza here, here, here ‘information cocoons’ here Instagram here internet here, here, here, here, here, here invention here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here irrigation here, here, here, here Italy here Jacobs, Jane here, here, here Jakarta here, here James, Sheila here Japan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here post-war development here schooling system here Jenner, Edward here Jesus Christ here Jobs, Steve here jobs apprenticeships here ‘lousy’ and ‘lovely’ here tradeable and non-tradeable here Justinian Plague here Kashmir here Kenya here Kinshasa here, here Kish here knowledge workers here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Koch, Robert here Kolkata here Korean War here Krugman, Paul here Kushim Tablet here Lagash here Lagos here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lahore here land titling programmes here Las Vegas here Latin language here Lee Kuan Yew here, here Leeds here, here Leicester here Leipzig here, here, here, here Letchworth here life expectancy here, here, here, here, here, here Liverpool here, here Ljubljana here London here, here, here, here, here, here, here bike lanes here Canary Wharf here, here Chelsea here, here, here China Town here cholera outbreaks here City of London here, here coffeehouses here and Covid-19 pandemic here financial services here gentrification here, here, here Great Stink here, here heatwaves here, here house prices here, here hybrid working here, here immigration here, here incomes here, here mayoralty here migration into inner London here population growth here, here, here poverty here, here public transport here, here, here slum housing here social housing here suburbanization here Los Angeles here, here, here, here Louisville here Luoyang here Luther, Martin here Luton Airport here Luxembourg here, here Lyon here McDonald’s here McDonnell Douglas here McLuhan, Marshall here Madagascar here malaria here, here, here, here Malaysia here Mali here malls, reinvention of here Manchester here, here, here, here, here, here, here Manila here Manning, Alan here Markle, Meghan here marriage here Marshall, Alfred here Marshall, Tim here Marx, Karl here Maya here, here measles here, here, here Meetup here mega regions here Mekong River here Memphis, Egypt here, here Mesoamerica here, here Mesopotamia here, here, here metallurgy here metaverse here methane here, here Mexico here Miami here, here, here microbiology here Microsoft here, here, here middle class, rise of here migration policy here millennial generation here Milwaukee here, here Minoan civilization here Mistry, Rohinton here MIT here MMR vaccine here ‘modernization’ theory here Mohenjo-Daro here, here Moretti, Enrico here, here mortality rates here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here motor car, invention of here Moynihan, Daniel here Mumbai here, here Mumford, Lewis here, here, here, here Munich here, here Mycenaean civilization here Nagoya here, here Nairobi here Nashville here National Landing, Arlington here Natural History Museum here natural resource exports here Nestlé here Netherlands here network effects here New Economics Foundation here New Orleans here, here New York here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here carbon emissions here and Covid-19 pandemic here gentrification here, here housing here, here, here incomes here, here Manhattan here, here, here, here, here population growth here, here and rising sea levels here slum housing here suburbanization here, here subway here waste and recycling here New York Central Railroad here New York World Fair here Newcastle here Nextdoor here Niger here Nigeria here, here, here, here Nilles, Jack here, here Nipah virus here Norway here, here Nottingham here Novgorod here ocean and air circulation here office rental and sales prices here Ohlin, Bertil here Oldenburg, Ray here online deliveries here OpenTable here Osaka here, here Oslo here Ottoman Empire here Oxford, population of here Oxford University here Pacific Belt Zone here Padua here Pakistan here, here, here pandemics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and zoonotic diseases here paramyxovirus here Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Paris Conference (2015) here Park Chung-hee, General here parks here Pasteur, Louis here Pearl River Delta here, here Peñalosa, Enrique here per capita income here Philadelphia here Philippines here, here Phoenix here, here Pixar here plague here, here, here, here Plato here plough, invention of here pollution here, here, here, here air pollution here, here, here, here population growth here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here PORTL here potter’s wheel, invention of here printing press here, here productivity here, here, here, here, here agricultural here, here Protestantism, rise of here public transport here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Putnam, Robert here, here quarantine here railways here, here, here, here, here high-speed rail here, here, here Ralston Purina here Reagan, Ronald here recycling here, here religion here remote and hybrid working here, here, here, here Renaissance Florence here, here, here renewable energy here, here Republic of Letters here République des Hyper Voisins here ‘resource curse’ here Rheingold, Howard here Ricardo, David here Rio de Janeiro here Riverside, San Francisco here robotics here Rockefeller, John D. here Roman Empire here, here, here Rome, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Romer, Paul here Rotterdam here Rousseau, Jean-Jacques here, here Sahel here, here sailboat, invention of here St Augustine here St Louis here, here, here Salesforce here San Diego here San Francisco here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here gentrification here, here hybrid working here, here San Francisco Bay Area here, here, here Santa Fe here São Paulo here Savonarola, Girolamo here Scientific American here Scott, Emmett J. here sea levels, rising here, here, here Seattle here, here, here, here, here, here Second Opium War here Seneca here Seoul here Shanghai here, here, here, here, here Shantou here Sheffield here, here, here Shen Nung here Shenzhen here, here Siemens here Silk Roads here, here Sinclair, Upton here Singapore here, here, here, here Slater, Samuel here smallpox here, here Smith, Adam here, here Snow, John here social capital here social housing here, here social media here, here, here, here, here Socrates here solar panels here South Africa here South Korea here, here, here, here, here, here Southdale Center here specialization here, here, here, here, here, here Spengler, Oswald here Starbucks here Stephenson, Neal here Stewart, General William here Stuttgart here Sub-Saharan Africa here subsidiarity principle here suburbanization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sunstein, Cass here Sweden here, here Sydney here, here, here, here, here, here Syrian refugees here, here Taiwan here Tanzania here telegraph here Tempest, Kae here Thailand here Thames River here, here Thatcher, Margaret here, here, here ‘third places’ here Tianjin here Tocqueville, Alexis de here Toffler, Alvin here Tokyo here, here, here, here trade liberalization here trade routes here Trump, Donald here, here tuberculosis here, here, here Twain, Mark here Twitter here, here typhoid here, here typhus here, here Uber here Uganda here Ukraine here, here Umayyad Caliphate here unemployment here, here United Nations here, here United States anti-global populism here anti-trust regulation and industrial consolidation here anxiety and depression here broadcasting here car registrations here cost of education here decline in trust here deindustrialization here Gilded Age here Great Migration here house prices here, here immigration here industrialization here inequality here labour mobility here ‘magnet schools’ here parking spaces here patent filings here per capita emissions here, here per capita incomes here remote working here, here, here return on equity here Rust Belt here schools funding here slavery here socioeconomic mobility here suburbanization here tax revenues here US Federal Housing Authority here US General Social Survey here US Trade Adjustment Assistance Program here universities here, here, here University College London here University of Texas here university-educated professionals here Ur here urban heat island effect here urbanism, subcultural theory of here Uruk here, here, here, here, here vaccines here, here Van Alstyne, Marshall here Vancouver here Venice here, here Vienna here, here Vietnam here voluntary associations here, here Wakefield, Andrew here walking here, here, here Wall Street here Warwick University here Washington University here WELL, The here Welwyn Garden City here wheel, invention of here wildfires here, here William the Conqueror here Wilson, Edward Osborne here, here Wilson, William here World Bank here, here World Health organization here World Trade Organization here World Wide Web here writing, invention of here Wuhan here, here Xiamen here Yangtze River here, here Yangtze River Delta here yellow fever here Yellow River here, here Yersinia pestis here Yokohama here YouTube here, here Yu the Great here Zhuhai here Zoom here Zoroastrianism here BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This electronic edition first published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin 2023 Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work All rights reserved.


pages: 361 words: 117,566

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

Selling some of his shares to the public by listing on the stock market looked like the best route to maximize their value, and another deal he’d done at a bargain price had paved the way to do it. Shortly after he rescued Wirecard, Bauer had scooped up the bones of a second company on its way to the glue factory. InfoGenie was an almost defunct operator of call centres from Berlin that was beset by accounting problems. It was a near-worthless penny stock, but it had gone through the expense and so-called scrutiny of an initial public offering on Frankfurt’s Neuer Markt in October 2000, a final piece of trash foisted on to the public in the dying days of the dotcom boom.

Wirecard anyway soon laid on a trip to Asia for a selection of investment bank analysts to see for themselves, bypassing most of the locations visited by J-Cap. In Jakarta the offices were thronged with staff and the analysts were treated to presentations from every layer of the Indonesian business, from call centres and IT all the way up to the top management: catnip for overworked analysts. There was plenty of time for taking photos, to pepper the glowing reports laying out what they learned for clients back home. They stopped in friendly Singapore, home to Wirecard’s Asian headquarters, then it was on to Chennai to discover more about the go-getting operations of Hermes (now relocated to modern, well-ventilated quarters).

Can I please speak to the person who’s written it?’ Earl persisted and eventually Perring gave in. There was another contributor who’d shared his work with Perring. This fourth man had found signs online of historic miscoding for US poker transactions by Wirecard in violation of the American ban, such as instructions for call centre operators. It was one of the Wise Men. He hadn’t employed Perring, the two of them had just been quietly comparing notes for months. Once Earl was introduced it took him about thirty seconds to grasp the point.fn1 In May 2016, Roddy went to a full-day Wirecard presentation for investors in London.


pages: 227 words: 81,467

How to Be Champion: My Autobiography by Sarah Millican

Albert Einstein, call centre, Downton Abbey, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson

While it sounds sad, those cries were very good for me and helped me get back behind my desk to work. I was worried that staying too long on frontline would desensitise me to emotions, so I was very glad to be headhunted to be part of a new team that would be working out the back of Felling Jobcentre, six Metro stops away. It was a call centre where the only thing I’d be doing was job searches. I was one of a team of about ten. We all worked in the same room, which had a small kitchenette off it where one of the girls pinned passive-aggressive poems about cleaning the microwave, and the tea club biscuit-tin lid was never on. Because we were in such a small room with our own loos and everything, we didn’t have to go far to get anything.

It was on that computer system that I spotted my next job: sound engineer. When I went for the interview and they told me it was for audiobooks, I was thrilled because I was going to be surrounded by books again. They’d had only male interviewees so far who’d thought it was a music role. I got the job, and on the day I left the call centre my friend Angela got a call from my warehouse man. She had put him in for a fair few jobs over the months, and he’d rung to pass a message on to me that he’d got himself one, which was the best leaving present I could have asked for. Producing audiobooks was like being a kid, but instead of your parent reading to you it’s a professional actor who can do all the voices.

I pride myself on the fact that I only missed half a day at work the whole time, but I know in my heart that I cried at my desk A LOT so I’m not sure how much actual work got done. At this point I was back working for the civil service. I’d left audiobooks because of the antisocial hours and this job, working in the call centre, was more money. I sat opposite an adorable bloke called Paul, and one day he asked how he could help me while I was snuffling behind my monitor. I told him I liked pictures of animals in clothes, so every time I was upset my email would ping and there would be a Yorkshire terrier in a ball gown.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Unless governments adopt policies that handle this disruption better, it will potentially affect even greater numbers of people than deindustrialisation. And to the extent that researchers can predict it, it is the places most left behind by the previous wave of automation that are most exposed to the next one. That is because lower-skilled routine jobs—for example in retail, warehousing, and customer service such as call centres—are both more threatened by technological innovation and disproportionately found in places that previously lost industry or mining jobs, places like the north of England or the US states of Indiana and Ohio. In contrast, the places with a high proportion of knowledge economy jobs—think Oxford or New York—are not just doing better already but are also more secure because such jobs tend to be harder to automate.25 In baseball, it’s three strikes and you’re out.

Much of the increase in US income inequality over the last decades has come not from inequality between the low and high paid within each company—between, say, the janitor and the CEO, though that has increased, too—but from a growing difference between what a janitor at a successful company is paid and what a janitor at an unsuccessful one is paid.26 In Europe and Japan, in contrast, concentration has not increased as much, perhaps because competition regulators have been more active.27 But everywhere, the rate at which newcomers enter markets to challenge established companies seems to be falling, which also reduces competitive pressures and therefore makes pro-competitive policy all the more important.28 Second, location can be a factor affecting market power. In small places, a supermarket chain, call centre, or delivery warehouse may offer the only jobs available to people with low formal skills. It is then hard to challenge poor working conditions. In the United States, employers have reduced competition for staff further by introducing “noncompete” clauses in employment contracts, making it harder for workers to take another job even when one exists.29 Third, the digital revolution threatens to worsen the imbalance of power further, inside production relationships, within labour markets, and against consumers.

But the broad definition of connectivity is crucial.19 Without the “software” of economic connectivity—the education, skills, and social aptitude to participate in the most modern economic activities—reducing “hard” distance may achieve little. Extending the area from which poorly paid workers can commute into cities to do low-productivity service work (or providing such work remotely, for example through call centres) does nothing to restore a sense of economic belonging. A striking illustration of how physical distance overlaps with psychological and social distance is that even in the era of ubiquitous social networks, people’s networks of online “friends” thins out fast with how far away they live.20 This matters for access to a knowledge economy where high-value services rely on cognitively and socially specific communication.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

ONLINE SERVICES AND ECALL It is already possible to send and receive e-mails or to listen to music from the Internet in cars. In the future, it will be possible to download videos in HD quality into cars as well. Along with improving quality and network capacity, it will be possible to use even more digital entertainment and communication services. eCall (emergency call) notifies an emergency call centre when an accident occurs. As of 2018, this emergency call system must be installed in all new vehicles in the European Union. A device installed in the vehicle automatically reports an accident using a standardised telephone number. General Motors has offered a similar system for its vehicles called OnStar in The Connected Car 137 numerous countries for several years.

The Connected Car 139 K e y T a ke a w a y s Vehicle connectivity will take place permanently via mobile-phone networks or with the help of ad-hoc networks. Ad-hoc networks will be used for V-to-V, V-to-I and V-to-X communications. Established online services allow the occupants to use the phone, send e-mails and play music from the Internet. eCall is a service to notify an emergency call centre of an accident and will be mandatory in new vehicles in all European countries as of 2018. With connected driving, information from other vehicles or from the infrastructure will be integrated into the real-world model of an autonomous vehicle. Connected mobility means that services for mobility encompassing all modes of transport will be offered in the future.

These data are primarily required for the driver assistance systems, and also so that more and more information and communication services can be provided to the customer in the vehicle [83]. Fundamentally, there are three categories of data that are generated in the vehicle: (1) Data are created by statutory regulations such as the automatic emergency call. In the case of an accident, data on the time, place and driving direction is sent to the emergency call centre. (2) Data result from technical processes such as the recognition of the environment with sensors and subsequent processing of that data. As a rule, these data are of a temporary nature, unless they are entered into the map producer’s database. And (3), data also come from the provision of services for which a contractual agreement exists.


pages: 160 words: 45,516

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future by Richard Susskind

business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disruptive innovation, global supply chain, information retrieval, invention of the wheel, power law, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, supply-chain management, telepresence, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

An illustration here is the US-based international law firm Orrick, which has a global operations centre based in Wheeling, West Virginia. Off-shoring is the transfer of legal work to countries in which labour and property costs are lower. Many large banks have off-shored some of their legal activities in this way—for example, to India and Malaysia—to places where they have already moved other functions, such as their call centres or their finance functions. On this model, the off-shored legal resource remains part of the bank. Outsourcing, in contrast, entails the conduct of legal work by a third party provider. This is often referred to as ‘legal process outsourcing’ or ‘LPO’. Routine legal tasks, such as document review, are handed to these specialist support companies, which, again, are usually in low-cost locations.

The problem with this is that it is proving too costly for routine and repetitive legal tasks to be discharged within firms and legal departments. And so, different approaches to sourcing such work are now gaining some traction: outsourcing to third party providers in low-cost countries; off-shoring legal work to locations where businesses have already transferred other functions, such as call centres; encouraging law firms to subcontract to practices in less costly regions; or using contract lawyers who charge about half the price of traditional law firms. These are all instances of what I call, in Chapter 2, the ‘efficiency strategy’—cutting the costs of legal service. Yet another possibility is co-sourcing, which can involve a group of in-house departments coming together and sharing the cost of some common legal service, perhaps by setting up shared services centres.


pages: 281 words: 47,243

Tuscany Road Trips by Duncan Garwood, Paula Hardy, Robert Landon, Nicola Williams

call centre, car-free, haute couture, low cost airline, Skype

International Calls A To call Italy from abroad, call the international access number (011 in the USA, 00 from most other countries), Italy’s country code (39) and then the area code of the location you want, including the leading 0. A The cheapest options for calling internationally are free or low-cost computer programs such as Skype, cut-rate call centres and international calling cards. A Cut-price call centres can be found in all of the main cities, and rates can be considerably lower than from Telecom payphones. A Another alternative is to use a direct-dialling service such as AT&T’s USA Direct (access number 800 172444) or Telstra’s Australia Direct (access number 800 172610), which allows you to make a reverse-charge (collect) call at home-country rates.


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

In order to do so, MoUs were signed with registrars, enrolment agencies were brought on board, operators were trained, a biometric device ecosystem was created, enrolment and de-duplication software was continuously upgraded and fine-tuned to function at scale, servers were procured, letters were printed and dispatched, and a multilingual call centre was set up to handle queries and grievances. It took a significant amount of time and effort right from the first enrolment to scale each of these processes to achieve the target of generating one million Aadhaar numbers a day, but when Nandan tendered his resignation as chairman of the UIDAI on 13 March 2014, he could do so with the knowledge that the UIDAI had succeeded in its goal of delivering over 600 million Aadhaar numbers in less than five years of its existence.

It was technology and data analytics that powered this leap, allowing us to choose the media and the message likely to have the greatest impact and then monitoring the results in real time. The campaign rolls out Once people knew who Nandan was, what he had achieved so far and what he hoped to do for Bangalore South, we now had to tackle the challenging task of persuading people to vote for him. Volunteers called the residents of Bangalore South through call centres, familiarizing them with Nandan’s biography and emphasizing the local connect, starting with the fact that he was born in Bangalore South. In the later stages of the campaign, the live calls were complemented by automated phone calls that played a pre-recorded message from Nandan urging people to cast their vote in his favour.

Funds can be raised on the basis of the party’s brand, and technology helps to log and utilize even the smallest of donations, as the AAP’s fundraising campaign demonstrated so ably. The platform will also offer a set of technology-based tools that candidates can access: digitized voter lists, voter look-up services for party workers, social media engagement, call centre management, 3D hologram rallies, and so on. All these technological innovations were deployed in the 2014 elections, and should soon enter the mainstream of Indian politics. The trend of political parties increasingly providing a set of tools, or an integrated launch platform to their candidates, will only accelerate in future elections.


The Unusual Billionaires by Saurabh Mukherjea

Albert Einstein, asset light, Atul Gawande, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Checklist Manifesto, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate governance, dematerialisation, disintermediation, diversification, equity risk premium, financial innovation, forensic accounting, full employment, inventory management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Thiel, QR code, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, work culture

As one of the largest dealers of Asian Paints located in South Mumbai told us, ‘I order products from Asian Paints five to ten times in a day and receive supplies three to four times daily. Until 1995–96, we used to call the depot to place our orders. Then they started their call centres in 2002–03. Now they incentivize us to order online rather than through the call centres, by giving us between Rs 500 and Rs 10,000 extra per month depending on the size of our online orders. Even if others copy this in a few years, they will have frequent stock-outs, and hence won’t meet our requirements.’ Asian Paints’s management told us, ‘Over the period 2000–15, IT has become a go-to resource for everyone in the company rather than being just a low-priority support function.

Until then, branch managers flew blindly, targeting anyone from a non-resident Indian to a senior citizen. Kaul stressed on discipline by insisting that branch managers provide clear strategies to attract customers. For example, a low-cost sales force was used to attract low-income customers who were serviced via call centres (only inbound calls), while high-end, priority customers were given dedicated relationship managers. However, Kaul’s bigger wins were getting the salary accounts of government departments, public sector employees, armed forces, etc. Having missed the private sector salary accounts to HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, Kaul managed to get the salary accounts from Mumbai Police, Delhi Police and teachers in Ahmedabad’s public schools.


Rome by Lonely Planet

bike sharing, bread and circuses, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, double helix, G4S, gentrification, Index librorum prohibitorum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, urban planning

On Sunday his partner wants to go to the Caravaggio exhibition at the Quirinale, but that’ll be packed, and he’d rather drive out to the Castelli Romani for lunch at Lago di Albano. Paolo Virzì’s 2008 film Tutta la vita davanti won critical praise for its bittersweet portrayal of a philosophy graduate who dreams of a job in research but ends up working the phones in a Roman call centre. Work Employment in the capital is largely based on Italy’s bloated state bureaucracy. Every morning armies of suited civil servants pour into town and disappear into vast ministerial buildings to keep the machinery of government ticking over. Other important employers include the tourist sector, banking, finance and culture – Italy’s historic film industry is largely based in Rome and there are hundreds of museums and galleries across town.

Italian law legislates against this, but sexual discrimination clearly remains an issue in many work places. Rome’s under 40s are another workplace minority with many young Romans forced to accept short-term contracts for jobs for which they are hugely overqualified such as working in a telephone call centre. These jobs typically offer no job security, no pension benefits and no prospects. Home Life & the Family Romans, like most Italians, live in apartments. These are often small – 75 to 100sq m is typical – and expensive. House prices in central Rome are among the highest in the country and many first time buyers are forced to move out of town or to distant suburbs outside of the GRA (the grande raccordo anulare ), the busy ring road that marks the city’s outer limit.

Telecom Italia (www.187.it, in Italian) sells prepaid wi-fi cards for €3 (one hour), €5 (five hours), €15 (24 hours) and €40 (seven days). International Calls To call abroad from Italy dial 00, then the relevant country and area codes, followed by the telephone number. Try to avoid making international calls from a hotel, as you’ll be stung by high rates. It’s cheaper to call from a private call centre or from a public payphone with an international calling card. These are available at newsstands and tobacconists, and are often good value. Another alternative is to use a direct-dialling service such as AT&T’s USA Direct (access number 800 172 444) or Telstra’s Australia Direct (access number 800 172 610), which allows you to make a reverse-charge call at home-country rates.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

In the short term it is not artificial intelligence the West should worry about. It is what Baldwin calls remote intelligence. In some respects it has already arrived. Over the last twenty years, India and the Philippines reaped the rewards of the telecoms revolution to create lower-skilled service sector jobs at call centres, and on technology helpdesks. Those jobs are now under threat. As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says, ‘Software is eating the world’. How many times have you talked to a computer recently, rather than someone with an Indian accent? A lot more than a few years ago, I would guess. Automated voice software is supplanting humans.

So too are rapid leaps in language-translation software (India should beware: China’s relative lack of English will no longer be such a disadvantage). In the West we spend half our time fretting about low-skilled immigrants. We should be worrying at least as much about high-skilled offshoring. Some types of medical surgeon and architect will be as vulnerable to remote intelligence as plant engineers or call-centre operators. Ironically, some of the lowest-paid jobs – in barbershops and nail salons – will be among the safest. No matter how dexterous your virtual service provider, it is hard to imagine how she could cut your hair. In the near future, technology will shift many more lucrative Western service jobs to the developing world.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Interactions like booking an airline ticket or changing a hotel reservation, resolving a problem with your bank, booking your car for a service or finding out the results of a paternity test could all be adequately handled by machine intelligences in the very near term. In many instances, they already are. A human won’t effectively differentiate the experience enough to justify the cost of a human-based call centre representative. In fact, my guess is that it won’t be long before you’ll have to agree to a charge if you want to speak to a “real” human. Many airlines and hotels already levy a phone service charge if you call instead of change a booking online. It’s pretty clear that human concierge services will become a premium level service only for the most valuable customer relationships in the future.

If she is lucky and can get an H1 Visa to work in the United States, she will probably need to leave her husband and children behind. Amazingly, the right robots might enable her to have the best of both worlds… What if Maria could stay in Manila and still work with patients in the United States? Imagine Maria in a call centre or even working from home. She is at her computer monitoring ten robot companions in an assisted care facility in Los Angeles. Each patient has a personal dedicated companion robot sitting by his or her bedside, running standard artificial general intelligence (AGI) software in a semi-autonomous mode.

At any time, be it in response to the sensors input, a patient request or emergency, or just daily health checks, a nurse or doctor can remote presence in and begin communicating through voice and video with the patient in an extremely efficient manner. Trained nurses or emergency response operators in a call centre could “remote in” immediately and begin assessing the situation of the patient more accurately than they do over the phone today asking questions as paramedics are dispatched. Some claim the elderly do not want to interact with robots, but the number of videos on YouTube that show older people happy with their carebots is increasing exponentially.


Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy, Kevin Raub

California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, Colonization of Mars, company town, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, QR code, rewilding, satellite internet, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Also has an ATM at the airport (in the departure area). Farmacia Cruz Verde (Av Atamu Tekena; 9am-7:30pm Mon-Sat) Large and well-stocked pharmacy. Hospital Hanga Roa ( 210-0215; Av Simon Paoa s/n) Mana@net (Av Atamu Tekena s/n; per hr CH$1200; 9am-10pm) Internet cafe and call centre. Omotohi Cybercafé (Av Te Pito o Te Henua s/n; per hr CH$1000; 9am-10pm) Internet and wi-fi access, and call centre. Police ( 133) Post office (Av Te Pito o Te Henua s/n; 9am-1pm & 2.30-6pm Mon-Fri, 9am-12:30pm Sat) Puna Vai (Av Hotu Matua; 8:30am-1pm & 3-8pm Mon-Sat, 9am-1pm Sun) This petrol station also doubles as an exchange office. Much more convenient than the bank (no queues, better rates, longer opening hours, no commission on traveler’s cheques).

Tipping & Bargaining Tipping and bargaining are not traditionally part of Polynesian culture. Telephone Easter Island’s international telephone code is the same as Chile’s ( 56), and the area code ( 32) covers the whole island. International calls (dial 00) start at around US$0.50 per minute. You’ll find several private call centres in town. Entel offers GSM cell-phone service, and prepaid SIM cards are available for purchase. TRANSPORTATION Getting There & Away Air The only airline serving Easter Island is LAN ( 210-0920; www.lan.com; Av Atamu Tekena s/n; 9am-4.30pm Mon-Fri, to 12.30pm Sat). It has daily flights to/from Santiago, one weekly flight to/from Pape’ete (Tahiti) and twice weekly flights to/from Lima (Peru).

Santos Pecadores COCKTAIL BAR (www.santospecadores.cl; Av Vicente Méndez 275; 8:30pm-late Tue-Sat; ) Chillanejos with plenty of dash and cash pour into this chichi red-walled bar northeast of the city center for sushi, ceviche and lots and lots of cocktails. DJs keep things going till late at weekends. Information Look for internet cafes, call centers, laundromats and other travelers’ services along pedestrianized Arauco. BancoEstado ( 455-291; Constitución 500; 9am-2pm Mon-Fri) One of many ATMs on this street. Hospital Herminda Martín ( 208-221; Francisco Ramírez 10) Public hospital on the corner of Av Argentina. Post office ( 800-267-736; Av Libertad 501; 8:30am-6:30pm Mon-Fri, 9am-12:45pm Sat) Sernatur ( 223-272; www.chile.travel/en.html; 18 de Septiembre 455; 8:30am-1:30pm & 3-6pm Mon-Fri) Friendly staff provide city maps and information on accommodations and transport.


The Rough Guide to Chile by Melissa Graham, Andrew Benson

Atahualpa, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, company town, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, feminist movement, Francisco Pizarro, it's over 9,000, Murano, Venice glass, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, union organizing, women in the workforce

February is also an easy time to get around in Santiago, as the city appears half-abandoned. Phones Using phonecards is a very practical way to phone abroad, and it’s worth stocking up on them in major cities, as you can’t always buy them in small towns and villages. Alternatively there are dozens of call centres or centros de llamadas in most cities, and some of them Major holidays | Travel Essentials offer cheap rates. Another convenient option is to take along an international calling card. Generally billed to your home phone account or credit card, these are very handy and easy to use, but are usually two or three times more expensive than buying a Chilean phonecard or using a centro de llamadas.

Free films and cultural guides. Internet Centro de Llamadas, Pedro Montt 2368 (CH$600 per hr); Internet Cerro Alegre, Urriola 678, Cerro Alegre (CH$400 per hr). Post office Prat 856. Telephone offices Entel, Pedro Montt 1940 and Condell 149, opposite the Municipalidad; Telefónica, Plaza Victoria and Sotomayor 55. Also cheap call centres around the bus station. The coastal resorts south of Valparaíso are among the busiest and most developed in the Litoral Central. A trail of seaside towns, full of busy hotels, cabañas and marisquerías, are linked by numerous micros and colectivos. Most sit on long, overcrowded beaches – in the summer, that is; in the winter they are forlorn and abandoned, often lost in marine fog.

Upstairs, a small museum (same hours) shows off a few Tehuelche artefacts and fossils of giant molluscs and other marine animals, reminders that thousands of years ago this area was covered by the sea. Practicalities | Across Lago General Carrera to Chile Chico Small supermarkets, internet cafés and call centres are found along O’Higgins. There is a single ATM at Banco Estado at O’Higgins and Baquedano; it only accepts MasterCard. Accommodation includes the friendly Hotel Plaza on the corner of O’Higgins and Balmaceda, with clean, basic rooms (T 67/411215; 3 ) and the Belgian-Chilean Hostería de la Patagonia at Chacra 3-A (T 67/411337; 4 ), a charming house with comfortable en-suite rooms, good home-cooked food, and outdoor excursions on offer, tucked away in a large garden on the eastern edge of town.


pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

What drove him was that his social mission was something meaningful that mattered to him a lot. It was authentic. It was, as Carlo said of Homeboy, real. Koum connected with it at a very deep and emotional level. Koum’s stand became WhatsApp’s brand. People knew they could rely on it. They knew they wouldn’t get a call in the night from a call centre in India pretending to be offering a Windows upgrade, or from the secret police. In an era of escalating disruption and ever-increasing change, if you hang on to what you do you get left behind. Why, though, creates a context in which innovation can occur. The bigger the why, the more meaningful and real it is for those involved – the bigger the impact.

Even though she is disgruntled with it and a far better alternative seems to be available, she can’t bring herself to switch. You can see the lawyer in her battle with that. If you look at Jay as a customer, her behaviour doesn’t make sense. We live in incredibly impatient and intolerant times. Consumers’ expectations have gone through the roof while their tolerance levels have tanked. Ask anyone who works in a call centre what it is like to deal with customers and you will hear some pretty grim tales. Trust and loyalty have hit an all-time low. Bright, savvy customers like Jay know how to get a good deal. If she were thinking and acting like a normal customer, Apple would be toast. But she isn’t. Jay’s behaviour mirrors that of the Manchester United supporters on the terraces at Old Trafford.


Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies by Christopher Grey

Bletchley Park, call centre, classic study, computer age, glass ceiling, index card, iterative process, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, post-war consensus, seminal paper, work culture

However, it is possible to see many resonances, at least, between BP and other organizations, including those of the present day. For example, the management of the Typex room, described in Chapter 5, with its intensive monitoring of individual output levels does not seem very far removed from current systems for managing call centres (Bain et al., 2002). Again, the enclosed, secretive community of BP might bear some comparison with the self-contained ‘Googleplex’ campus of the Google corporation (Stiernstedt and Jakobsson, 2009). Another instance would be the parallels between the ‘instinctive’ ability of an intelligence analyst or cryptanalyst to spot tiny hints – as discussed in Chapter 6 – and Weick and Roberts’ (1993) observation of the way that flight crews need to be alert to small things which might have large consequences.

This experiment is in large part a matter of the adoption of a certain style of analysis, as indicated earlier, especially in terms of the manner of the use of organization theory. It is also a matter of methodology, in that it uses a historical case and, finally, of extending the normal range of the kinds of organizations considered by organization studies. This range is normally quite limited, with banks, consultancy firms, airlines, manufacturing companies, call centres and so on featuring prominently and repetitively (Rehn, 2008). Breaking with this established repertoire may also be a way of reviving organization studies. Of course, some may feel that this is an entirely misplaced exercise, that organization studies is proceeding perfectly well and is in no need of any such reviving.

New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Bakken, T. and Hernes, T. 2006. ‘Organization is both a noun and a verb: Weick meets Whitehead’, Organization Studies 27: 1599–616. Bain, P., Watson, A., Mulvey, G., Taylor, P. and Gall, G. 2002. ‘Taylorism, targets and the pursuit of quantity and quality by call centre management’, New Technology, Work and Employment 17: 170–85 Barley, S. 2010. ‘Building an institutional field to corral a government: A case to set an agenda for organization studies’, Organization Studies 31: 777–805 Barley, S. and Kunda, G. 2001. ‘Bringing work back in’, Organization Science 12: 76–95 Batey, M. 2010.


pages: 386 words: 119,465

Unnatural Causes by Richard Shepherd

call centre, David Attenborough, haute couture, Piper Alpha

Identification was, and is, the first priority for the pathologists in any mass disaster – there were many worried relatives, desperate for reliable information. The number of a call centre had been given out through the media for friends and relatives to phone, but it had no queuing system so callers found it to be constantly engaged. One can only wonder at the anger and frustration that caused. But the lesson was learned and call centres were organized and designed differently after that. There were thirty-five deaths but over the ensuing day the call centre took 8,000 calls, and there were many more to hospitals and even mortuaries. If injuries were slight the police gave information over the phone.


pages: 424 words: 114,820

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

They looked at existing people doing the job and then measured skills, attitudes and qualifications and asked the line managers to ‘blind’ mark their skills using a defined matrix. They also looked at other factors that may have been important for the person in the job such as whether performance was better in those with a short commute. What they realized was that qualifications were not a key factor for the specific call centre job. They also interestingly found out that having too much empathy in an outbound call centre work wasn’t very good. This may be because that person worries too much about the customer at the end of the phone and takes their clients home with them at the end of the day, worrying if they have upset them in some way or not. There is good research evidence of gender bias in the words we use for job descriptions and how this can impact on whether someone applies for the job.

Explain the ‘rules’ of each setting, what is expected and be explicit, including ones that are less obvious such as team meetings, social activities and meeting with line managers. Phone calls. These can be challenging if you need to remember information, follow oral instructions, and especially if someone is speaking too fast or not clearly, or there is background noise. Some people, for example in a call centre, may have to manage dual tasking such as listening, seeking out information online and writing down information accurately. Face-to-face meetings. Think about the setting and the other person’s pace of conversation. Supporting someone with numeracy challenges Seeing a list of numbers or an Excel sheet can for some people result in real feelings of anxiety.


pages: 204 words: 66,619

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them by Mushtak Al-Atabi

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business climate, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, corporate social responsibility, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, follow your passion, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, invention of the wheel, iterative process, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, mirror neurons, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, remote working, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking

The market is segmented and a different value is delivered to each segment. 11.3.2 Channels In order to engage the customers and deliver the created value to them, appropriate channels must be created and kept open. Through these channels a business can create awareness and market its products and services, sell and deliver these products and services, as well as provide after-sales services. Channels will include stores, websites and call centres. Taking a car company for example, the value is delivered to the customer through various marketing activities, making the cars available for a test drive, selling the car, and eventually providing after-sales services and scheduled maintenance. To achieve this, the car manufacturer may use different media as awareness channels - car showrooms for exhibiting the cars and arranging for test drives, and service centres for the maintenance of the cars sold. 11.3.3 Revenue and Cost Money is the lifeline of any entrepreneurial undertaking.

People involved in creating and delivering the value need to be qualified, trained, well compensated and motivated to do their best and ensure that the intended value is consistently created and delivered. Method Methods and processes represent the recipe used to create and deliver the value. They refer to the way a patient is examined at a hospital, a haircut is executed at a saloon, a phone call is handled at a call centre, a car is assembled at a factory, a washing machine is repaired at a workshop, and an exam paper corrected at a school. These methods should be well documented, clear, efficient, effective and consistent. A good method should have no bottleneck and should also be free of non-value-adding steps.


The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

Consequently, we might decide on a course of action that we know, rationally, makes no sense, but we make these poor choices nonetheless because of how they feel. For example, we might take that extra cookie when we are trying to lose weight, delay getting started on a project when we are already well aware that the timescales for completing it are inadequate, or get angry with a call centre operator at the bank because we forgot to pay our credit card bill on time and they refused to waive the fine. Here's another example: I'm pretty sure that almost all human beings get angry from time to time, but how rational is it to allow a discussion to get heated just because we don't like its direction?

We have a seemingly unlimited capability to create a “tiger” out of practically anything: Someone takes your parking space or bumps into you with their shopping trolley. A text message from the boss asking you to come to her office. People who look different. Sitting in rush hour traffic or a delayed train! A look of disapproval (especially from someone like your spouse). Call centres. A meal in a restaurant that you don't approve of. You get the picture … all of these things have a fear hiding in the background and, like the child with the toy hammer, this gives them the potential power to squeeze out everything else. Once something has triggered us, we effectively become like an amped-up animal, only able to concentrate on the three things that are of the greatest importance for survival: To ensure our physical safety, the body must take priority – it needs to be protected.


pages: 228 words: 66,975

Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?: Olympic-Winning Strategies for Everyday Success by Ben Hunt-Davis, Harriet Beveridge

call centre, James Dyson, Kickstarter

The crew had bucket-loads of techniques that are easy to understand and easy to apply. Over the last ten years Ben and I have coached thousands of individuals and we’ve found the techniques described in this book invaluable for helping ourselves and our clients unlock our potential and live happier, more successful lives. Our clients come from all walks of life – call centre staff, sales reps, leadership teams, mums, athletes, team managers, accountants, shop assistants. Whatever your challenges, whatever your goals, there are strategies here that will give you a big boost. How this book works We’ve divided the book up into eleven chapters. Each chapter is divided into two halves: A narrative bit.

Ben: “They may not have been in the boat actually pulling the oars, but Shambles, [Chris Shambrook the psychologist] and Harry and Martin, the coaches, were crucial to making the boat go faster.” Have you ever got hacked off because your colleagues don’t appreciate how much time it takes to do something? I was on a project years ago to set up a call centre. The telecoms guy was breezily asked if he could pop a few more phones in than originally planned and the poor man pretty much spontaneously combusted. None of us had appreciated the complexity involved in setting up more capacity on the system. It’s useful to have team conversations about what each person does and how it helps to achieve the team goal, so everyone has clarity about their contribution and respect for the work involved. 1c.


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

By the end of the twentieth century, however, many of these jobs and the communities that were forged around them were long gone. Working-class people are now far more likely to work in supermarkets, call centres, shop floors and offices, and though that is truer today than ever, it was a process that was well underway by the 1990s. Unionization in the service sector is low: in retail only around 12 per cent are union members.7 Turnover levels are high: overall, 15 per cent of workers shift jobs each year, but in call centres, for example, the rate is over a quarter.8 The rise of zero-hour contracts from the 1990s onwards, along with increased numbers of temporary and agency workers, and reluctant part-time workers, has produced a more precarious, individualized workforce, particularly among younger workers.

Tony Benn, The Benn Diaries (Hutchinson, 1995), p. 388 3. https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/joe-murphy-jeremy-corbyn-will-hang-on-as-leader-but-the-battle-is-far-from-over-a3350531.html 4. http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab74feb.htm 5. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/16/tony-benn-1980-interview-loss-thatcher-surrender-defeat-labour 6. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (O Books, 2009), p. 2 7. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/805268/trade-union-membership-2018-statistical-bulletin.pdf 8. http://corporate.centralus.co.uk/articles/call-centre-turnover/ 9. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-22073434/tony-blair-my-job-was-to-build-on-some-thatcher-policies 10. https://wwws.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/02/labourconference.labour6 11. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/2475301/Labour-membership-falls-to-historic-low.html 12. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4422086.stm 13. http://www.johnmcdonnell.org.uk/2007/02/new-labour-privatises-probation-and.html 14. https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/data/boroughs/islington-poverty-and-inequality-indicators/ 15. https://www.ft.com/content/363af3be-1236-11e8-940e-08320fc2a277 16. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/feb/16/homeownership-among-young-adults-collapsed-institute-fiscal-studies 17. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/20/youth-services-suffer-70-funding-cut-in-less-than-a-decade 18. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2289017.stm 19. https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/09/277888.html 20. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1562023/Tories-vow-to-match-Labour-spending.html 21. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/sep/15/george-osborne-speech-full-text 22. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/mar/25/alistair-darling-cut-deeper-margaret-thatcher 23. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/sep/18/nick-clegg-liberal-democrats-spending 24. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/4248254/MP-suspended-for-picking-up-mace-during-Heathrow-debate.html 25. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/apr/21/g20-protest-video-police 26. https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/03/474954.html 27. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/07/polling-queues-hundreds-unable-vote 28. https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2011/12/20/uk-uncut-vindicated-commons-report-backs-protest-group 29. https://www.ft.com/content/b189980a-19a5-11e9-9e64-d150b3105d21 30. https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/10342/Value-of-university-staff-pay-has-plummeted-in-last-decade-employers-own-research-reveals 31. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/21/england-universities-in-deficit-figures-financial-pressure 32. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46459694 33. https://www.newstatesman.com/newspapers/2010/12/police-malik-caught-students; https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/dec/15/jody-mcintyre-protester-dragged-from-wheelchair; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-11967098 34. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmhansrd/cm101213/debtext/101213-0001.htm 35. https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/journalist-shiv-malik-injured-by-police-baton/ 36. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8213287/Len-McCluskey-head-of-Britains-biggest-union-praises-magnificent-student-protest-movement.html CHAPTER 2 1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/29/ed-miliband-labour-leadership-change 2. https://labourlist.org/2010/08/the-growth-deniers-ed-balls-full-speech/ 3. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/sep/27/ed-miliband-speech-labour-conference 4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11153166 5. https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/11/25/conservative-blame-spending-cuts/ 6. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/30/chris-leslie-interview-labour-shadow-chancellor-election 7. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2020/04/03/three-years-in-hell-fintan-otoole-on-the-disastrous-corbyn-effect/ 8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

A more experienced driver probably would not have followed that prompt, because doing so would accumulate a lot of unpaid “deadhead” miles—the expense of driving without a passenger—with a slim chance of a ride request. I meet Tanisha, a woman in her twenties, on a bright day in Dallas, Texas, as I make my way over to nearby Fort Worth. She left her job at a call center in Dallas to work for Lyft and Uber in order to get away from the stifling, heavily managed environment of call center work.33 She was motivated by Uber’s siren call to be her own boss. “It is good extra money on the side. Part-time-wise, the most I made was two hundred dollars in one week. . . . At that time, I was doing at least four to five hours for three or four days,” she offers.

Andrew Cherlin discusses marital churn in American society by situating it in the context of a growing dichotomy between individualism and neoliberal autonomy, and marriage as a formal, long-standing commitment, in The Marriage-Go-Round (New York: Vintage, 2010). 4. Kirstie S. Ball and Stephen T. Margulis, “Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in Call Centres: A Framework for Investigation,” New Technology, Work and Employment 26, no. 2 (2011): 113–126, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468–005X.2011.00263.x/abstract. 5. Global News Staff, “Uber Can Now Legally Operate in Quebec,” Global News, October 22, 2016, http://globalnews.ca/news/3019867/uber-can-now-legally-operate-in-quebec/. 6.

For example, drivers’ primary (and often exclusive) point of communication with Uber is by email, although toward the end of 2017, drivers gained in-person driver hubs (physical locations where drivers can receive in-person support) and a telephone number to call in some cities. Drivers don’t have a dedicated human manager who responds to their inquiries. Instead, they have community support representatives (CSRs), located at the email equivalent of a call center, often located abroad, such as in the Philippines,8 and managed by third-party companies, like Zendesk.9 Effectively, Uber offshores and automates its main communications with drivers. Drivers receive automated replies to most of their inquiries, which often appear to be based on keywords in the text of their emails.


pages: 252 words: 74,167

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Such changes can have a major impact on how we communicate with and respond to AI assistants, both in terms of our levels of comfort (and thereby how often we use them) and our efficiency while doing so. People are regularly attracted to those who are similar to themselves. As an illustration of how this could prove useful, Chicago’s Mattersight Corporation has created technology that analyses the speech patterns of people phoning up call centres. It then uses this information to put callers through to employees who are skilled at dealing with their specific personality type. According to Mattersight, a person patched through to an individual with whom they share similarity attraction is likely to have an average call length of five minutes, with a successful resolution rate of 92 per cent.

To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 2, 228, 242–4 2045 Initiative 217 accountability issues 240–4, 246–8 Active Citizen 120–2 Adams, Douglas 249 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 19–20, 33 Affectiva 131 Age of Industry 6 Age of Information 6 agriculture 150–1, 183 AI Winters 27, 33 airlines, driverless 144 algebra 20 algorithms 16–17, 59, 67, 85, 87, 88, 145, 158–9, 168, 173, 175–6, 183–4, 186, 215, 226, 232, 236 evolutionary 182–3, 186–8 facial recognition 10–11, 61–3 genetic 184, 232, 237, 257 see also back-propagation AliveCor 87 AlphaGo (AI Go player) 255 Amazon 153, 154, 198, 236 Amy (AI assistant) 116 ANALOGY program 20 Analytical Engine 185 Android 59, 114, 125 animation 168–9 Antabi, Bandar 77–9 antennae 182, 183–5 Apple 6, 35, 56, 65, 90–1, 108, 110–11, 113–14, 118–19, 126–8, 131–2, 148–9, 158, 181, 236, 238–9, 242 Apple iPhone 108, 113, 181 Apple Music 158–9 Apple Watch 66, 199 architecture 186 Artificial Artificial Intelligence (AAI) 153, 157 Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 226, 230–4, 239–40, 254 Artificial Intelligence (AI) 2 authentic 31 development problems 23–9, 32–3 Good Old-Fashioned (Symbolic) 22, 27, 29, 34, 36, 37, 39, 45, 49–52, 54, 60, 225 history of 5–34 Logical Artificial Intelligence 246–7 naming of 19 Narrow/Weak 225–6, 231 new 35–63 strong 232 artificial stupidity 234–7 ‘artisan economy’ 159–61 Asimov, Isaac 227, 245, 248 Athlone Industries 242 Atteberry, Kevan J. 112 Automated Land Vehicle in a Neural Network (ALVINN) 54–5 automation 141, 144–5, 150, 159 avatars 117, 193–4, 196–7, 201–2 Babbage, Charles 185 back-propagation 50–3, 57, 63 Bainbridge, William Sims 200–1, 202, 207 banking 88 BeClose smart sensor system 86 Bell Communications 201 big business 31, 94–6 biometrics 77–82, 199 black boxes 237–40 Bletchley Park 14–15, 227 BMW 128 body, machine analogy 15 Bostrom, Nick 235, 237–8 BP 94–95 brain 22, 38, 207–16, 219 Brain Preservation Foundation 219 Brain Research Through Advanced Innovative Neurotechnologies 215–16 brain-like algorithms 226 brain-machine interfaces 211–12 Breakout (video game) 35, 36 Brin, Sergey 6–7, 34, 220, 231 Bringsjord, Selmer 246–7 Caenorhabditis elegans 209–10, 233 calculus 20 call centres 127 Campbell, Joseph 25–6 ‘capitalisation effect’ 151 cars, self-driving 53–56, 90, 143, 149–50, 247–8 catering 62, 189–92 chatterbots 102–8, 129 Chef Watson 189–92 chemistry 30 chess 1, 26, 28, 35, 137, 138–9, 152–3, 177, 225 Cheyer, Adam 109–10 ‘Chinese Room, the’ 24–6 cities 89–91, 96 ‘clever programming’ 31 Clippy (AI assistant) 111–12 clocks, self-regulating 71–2 cognicity 68–9 Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organises (CALO) 112 cognitive psychology 12–13 Componium 174, 176 computer logic 8, 10–11 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) 96–7 Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) 168, 175, 177 computers, history of 12–17 connectionists 53–6 connectomes 209–10 consciousness 220–1, 232–3, 249–51 contact lenses, smart 92 Cook, Diane 84–6 Cook, Tim 91, 179–80 Cortana (AI assistant) 114, 118–19 creativity 163–92, 228 crime 96–7 curiosity 186 Cyber-Human Systems 200 cybernetics 71–4 Dartmouth conference 1956 17–18, 19, 253 data 56–7, 199 ownership 156–7 unlabelled 57 death 193–8, 200–1, 206 Deep Blue 137, 138–9, 177 Deep Knowledge Ventures 145 Deep Learning 11–12, 56–63, 96–7, 164, 225 Deep QA 138 DeepMind 35–7, 223, 224, 245–6, 255 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 33, 112 Defense Department 19, 27–8 DENDRAL (expert system) 29–31 Descartes, René 249–50 Dextro 61 DiGiorgio, Rocco 234–5 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 31 Digital Reasoning 208–9 ‘Digital Sweatshops’ 154 Dipmeter Advisor (expert system) 31 ‘do engines’ 110, 116 Dungeons and Dragons Online (video game) 197 e-discovery firms 145 eDemocracy 120–1 education 160–2 elderly people 84–6, 88, 130–1, 160 electricity 68–9 Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) 12, 13, 92 ELIZA programme 129–30 Elmer and Elsie (robots) 74–5 email filters 88 employment 139–50, 150–62, 163, 225, 238–9, 255 eNeighbor 86 engineering 182, 183–5 Enigma machine 14–15 Eterni.me 193–7 ethical issues 244–8 Etsy 161 Eurequa 186 Eve (robot scientist) 187–8 event-driven programming 79–81 executives 145 expert systems 29–33, 47–8, 197–8, 238 Facebook 7, 61–2, 63, 107, 153, 156, 238, 254–5 facial recognition 10–11, 61–3, 131 Federov, Nikolai Fedorovich 204–5 feedback systems 71–4 financial markets 53, 224, 236–7 Fitbit 94–95 Flickr 57 Floridi, Luciano 104–5 food industry 141 Ford 6, 230 Foxbots 149 Foxconn 148–9 fraud detection 88 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 211 Furbies 123–5 games theory 100 Gates, Bill 32, 231 generalisation 226 genetic algorithms 184, 232, 237, 257 geometry 20 glial cells 213 Go (game) 255 Good, Irving John 227–8 Google 6–7, 34, 58–60, 67, 90–2, 118, 126, 131, 155–7, 182, 213, 238–9 ‘Big Dog’ 255–6 and DeepMind 35, 245–6, 255 PageRank algorithm 220 Platonic objects 164, 165 Project Wing initiative 144 and self-driving cars 56, 90, 143 Google Books 180–1 Google Brain 61, 63 Google Deep Dream 163–6, 167–8, 184, 186, 257 Google Now 114–16, 125, 132 Google Photos 164 Google Translate 11 Google X (lab) 61 Government Code and Cypher School 14 Grain Marketing Adviser (expert system) 31 Grímsson, Gunnar 120–2 Grothaus, Michael 69, 93 guilds 146 Halo (video game) 114 handwriting recognition 7–8 Hank (AI assistant) 111 Hawking, Stephen 224 Hayworth, Ken 217–21 health-tracking technology 87–8, 92–5 Healthsense 86 Her (film, 2013) 122 Herd, Andy 256–7 Herron, Ron 89–90 High, Rob 190–1 Hinton, Geoff 48–9, 53, 56, 57–61, 63, 233–4 hive minds 207 holograms 217 HomeChat app 132 homes, smart 81–8, 132 Hopfield, John 46–7, 201 Hopfield Nets 46–8 Human Brain Project 215–16 Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) 153, 154 hypotheses 187–8 IBM 7–11, 136–8, 162, 177, 189–92 ‘IF THEN’ rules 29–31 ‘If-This-Then-That’ rules 79–81 image generation 163–6, 167–8 image recognition 164 imagination 178 immortality 204–7, 217, 220–1 virtual 193–8, 201–4 inferences 97 Infinium Robotics 141 information processing 208 ‘information theory’ 16 Instagram 238 insurance 94–5 Intellicorp 33 intelligence 208 ambient 74 ‘intelligence explosion’ 228 top-down view 22, 25, 246 see also Artificial Intelligence internal combustion engine 140–1, 150–1 Internet 10, 56 disappearance 91 ‘Internet of Things’ 69, 70, 83, 249, 254 invention 174, 178, 179, 182–5, 187–9 Jawbone 78–9, 92–3, 254 Jennings, Ken 133–6, 138–9, 162, 189 Jeopardy!


Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

The meeting will take place at the Taliban’s new office in Doha – I like the fact they’re opening new branches, so long as it doesn’t get like Starbucks where you’ve got a Taliban on every high street. I wonder why they need an office – perhaps they’re branching out and are going to start dealing with both insurgencies and van hire. I bet it’ll be another call centre – we’ll be plagued by the Taliban ringing up to ask if we need replacement windows or do we want to wait until after the car bombing? There was outrage when burnt Korans were found at a NATO base in Afghanistan. They’d only been partially burnt. That’s because the book on how to maintain a bonfire had been burnt the week before, on a bonfire of books about codes of conduct in sensitive areas.

Life isn’t necessarily getting better. For every new kid who’s now able to plug himself into the internet, there’s a little cloud of black smoke going up somewhere. In the 70s we were told to prepare ourselves for a new world of technologically supported leisure and extended free time. What we got was call centres. The world is becoming an increasingly soulless place. We’ve replaced genuine human emotions with the communal buzz of the electronically connected hive mind, with its indistinguish-able identikit opinions about films and TV programmes we probably won’t have time to see anyway. We’ve substituted genuine wonder at the mystery and beauty of nature with a belief that trees and butterflies and human consciousness are machine-like.


pages: 290 words: 87,084

Branded Beauty by Mark Tungate

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, call centre, corporate social responsibility, double helix, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, haute couture, independent contractor, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, liberal capitalism, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, stem cell

Seabra was an early adopter of ‘sustainable’ practices, taking care to ensure that none of the company’s suppliers used child labour and investing a percentage of profits in social projects. Refillable packaging was launched as early as 1983. Sales staff are paid an average of 16 times higher than minimum wage, are given shares in the company and receive regular training in the latest skincare advances. Natura remains responsive to consumers, with a call centre to deal with enquiries from consultants and customers. Seabra has not been afraid to rely on his instincts: he launched a line of products for infants (Mamãe e Bebê, or Mother and Baby) against the advice of his researchers. Like Shiseido, he believes cosmetics are vital for boosting well-being and self-esteem.

Arnaud explains, ‘When you meet someone you like, if your strategy is good enough, the validation comes with a kiss. After that, anything can happen.’) This attracted an impressive list of clients, ranging from Louis Vuitton and Vogue to L’Oréal and Christian Dior Cosmetics. They both know branding backwards. Isabelle worked for a string of well-known agencies. Arnaud ran a call centre before running off to New York to play electronic music and set up an agency called Reflex. Then he came back to Paris to work for another agency, before meeting Isabelle at a dinner. They call Jak ‘a strategy, design, creation and curiosity agency’. The seed of Absolution lies in the word ‘creation’.


pages: 252 words: 80,924

Sarah Millican--The Queen of Comedy by Tina Campanella

call centre, Desert Island Discs, fake news, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, side project, Skype, Stephen Fry, upwardly mobile

So after her A levels, Sarah did a course in film and television production as a way of keeping up her creative interests – but with no thought of putting herself in front of the camera. She tried to get into television production in nearby Newcastle, but there were few jobs, so she was unsuccessful. Then followed a stream of unfulfilling roles in jobs that couldn’t even begin to challenge the clever comic-to-be. She worked in a call centre, and then as a producer for audio books. She is still amused by the title of one Mills and Boon book she recorded in the course of her work: Once Upon A Mattress. ‘It seemed to happen that we always read sex scenes on a Sunday morning,’ she has explained. ‘Which seemed so wrong in so many ways.’

She worked day and night until she achieved critical acclaim, and she has approached each milestone since with the same work ethic. For Sarah, every award and every positive review was never enough. It simply spurred her on to do bigger and better things. And if it all ended – this magnificent, glittering career she has made for herself? ‘I’m very good in a call centre, so if this all goes to pot I’ll just try and get back into that,’ she says. ‘With this soft Geordie accent I could probably get a job in the complaints department. I’m pretty good at calming people down.’ Even then it was doubtful you’d ever hear Sarah’s voice on the line again, and things were only going to get better for her, personally and professionally, in 2013.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

The very act of owning up to its mistakes allowed Domino’s to cut through the din and reboot its relationship with customers. PR experts agree that the best way for a company to handle a mistake is to apologize and explain what it will do to put things right. This accords with my own experience. The other day a payment into my bank account went astray. After 20 minutes of evasion from the call centre, my voice began to rise as my blood reached boiling point. And then a manager came on the line and said: “Mr Honoré, I’m very sorry. We made a mistake with this payment.” As she explained how the money would be retrieved, my fury drained away and we ended up bantering about the weather and our summer holidays.

When asked on retirement what advice he would give to budding entrepreneurs, Conrad Hilton, founder of the eponymous hotel chain, told them to sweat the small stuff with a memorable one-liner: “Don’t forget to tuck the shower curtain in the bath.” When Sir Richard Branson visits any of the 300 businesses in his Virgin empire, he makes a note of every small failing that catches his eye, from a dirty carpet in an airplane cabin to an employee using the wrong tone of voice in a call centre. “[The] only difference between merely satisfactory delivery and great delivery is attention to detail,” he wrote recently. “Delivery is not just limited to the company’s first day: employees across the business should be focusing on getting it right all day, every day.” Even the hell-raising hard rockers of Van Halen understood that.


pages: 223 words: 10,010

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

The scale of what has been called the ‘hollowing out of the middle’ is shown in figure 3.4 which charts the change in employment by 1999 in jobs ranked by their position in the 1979 wage distribution. This shows a growth in the number of jobs at the top tail of the distribution—business executives, senior managers, consultants, data processors, software engineers; a smaller rise in the number of low paid jobs in the lower tail—cleaners, hairdressers, shop assistants and call centre workers; and sharp falls in the number of jobs paying middle wages in 1979—machine setters, foundry labourers, plant and rail signal operatives and a range of routine clerical jobs that have become automated.112 In the immediate post-war decades—across mature economies—there used to be more of a continuum in jobs, wages and opportunities with more intermediate, middleskill, middle-paying work that filled the gap between semi-and unskilled blue-collar and higher paying professional jobs.

Having tasted the towering rewards that followed from the introduction of stock options in the booming share market of the 1990s, most executives were only too happy to fall into line. Matthew Barratt, who became chief executive of Barclays Bank in early 2000, announced the wholesale closure of high street branches and the transfer of former face-to-face customer services to call centres. While this was deeply unpopular with staff and customers, its potential to cut costs and improve profit margins ‘went down a storm’ in the City.183 The other retail banks soon joined in the aggressive pursuit of shareholder value, shedding staff in an ongoing cost-cutting drive. The number of bank branches halved in the 20 years to 2009.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

However, software, data analysis, and new management practices make close observation much easier, with the result that the activities of workers who once had to be trusted can now be observed in detail, compared, and assessed. Amazon’s ability to monitor how many packages its warehouse staff ships per hour, how many calls call centre workers handle per hour, and how much time customer service reps spend between calls is grounded in intangibles—the software and business processes used to measure and reward employees’ performance. Similar technologies and practices increase inequality among white-collar workers. For example, Luis Garicano and Thomas Hubbard showed how better systems for monitoring performance and hours billed allowed law firms to differentiate between their highest performers and the rest.10 The stars ended up being paid more, while the laggards got left behind or were fired.

in 2013 by banning working from home, reversing an earlier move to more home working and requiring employees to come into the office or quit the company, and in the summer of 2021 Tom Cook, the CEO of Apple, announced that he wanted his home-working staff back in the office in the autumn. Perhaps it is not surprising that the productivity effects of working from home are decidedly mixed, according to a survey by Isabel Sawhill and Katherine Guyot.36 In one experiment at a large Chinese travel agency, call centre employees were randomly assigned to work from home. Those working from home increased their performance by 13 percent, partly due to more calls per minute but mostly because they simply took fewer breaks and fewer days off. After the experiment ended, however, the workers who remained at home were less likely to be promoted.37 In a different study, of a knowledge-intensive IT services consulting company, working from home during COVID reduced productivity.38 These examples show how much productivity varies across jobs in different sectors.


pages: 259 words: 84,261

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

And the god, puzzled by our greed, still granted our wish. We created artificial intelligence. Armed with this unfathomable power, we cast our greedy eyes to every corner of our life. With the lightest touch, we added AI to our shopping sites, gaming engines, cars and design apps. We added it to our call centres, banks and our phones. Above all, we added it to our surveillance systems, law enforcement systems and our weapons and war machines. Those who had money made more money and those who were lazy became lazier. It all seemed to be amazing, all-of-us thought, and it was, had it not been for one minor, overlooked detail.

This could help reverse the elephant-poaching activities that conservationists are warning could lead to the iconic animals disappearing in our lifetime if the tide doesn’t turn.3 Good, so those machines are learning that we love elephants and should attempt to save them and that those who harm elephants are in the minority and are not approved by most of humanity. That’s another very good thing to teach them. Let’s keep going. We are also already telling the machines that we are interested in our own human health and longevity. Emergency call centres in Denmark use AI to detect if the caller is suffering a heart attack. Researchers at the University of California in San Francisco, UCSF, used a deep neural network called Cardiogram to identify, with 85 per cent accuracy, people with prediabetes. They did this by analysing a user’s heart rate and step counts through sensors commonly found in wearable fitness devices.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As a youngster growing up at the time when some of the British Empire had yet to be dismantled, I remember a popular racist myth that people were poor in certain countries because they were lazy or unintelligent, while the British were enterprising and industrious, and hence richer. This of course is nonsense. If you think of virtually any occupation that is found in a wide range of countries – teacher, labourer, engineer, doctor, retailer, call centre operator – in most cases their pay is higher in rich countries than in middling or poor countries, though this has nothing to do with how hard they work or how intelligent they are. Again, rich countries have a higher level of technological development, and their workers tend to use more of this technology than do their counterparts in poorer countries, so things can be produced more easily, quickly and cheaply, even though wages and salaries are relatively high.

When a rich country like the US trades with a poor one like Bangladesh, not just the rich, but everyone in the rich country benefits from getting cheap goods, provided by cheap labour. Most of Europe has benefitted from this unequal exchange for over two centuries, from cotton and cocoa to jeans, electronic goods and call centre services. For any given traded product, the workers in the poor country have to work much longer to be able to afford it than do their counterparts in rich countries. Even if they’re working in state-of-the-art factories producing tablet computers, as some Chinese suppliers of western firms are, their pay is still low.

When we think about how much money people should get, we are actually considering how big their claims on the labour of others should be, relative to those of others. In the modern global economy, though we rarely think of it, each of us relies on thousands of other workers to produce the goods and services we consume, be they garment workers in the Philippines, assemblers of electronic goods in China, banana growers in St Lucia or call centre workers in India – or, indeed, shop assistants, dentists, garage mechanics and bar staff in our local town. As we saw in Part Two, the inequalities at the international level derive mainly from inequalities in the level of development of ‘the forces of production’; workers in countries like India or Thailand get much less for supplying westerners with goods than western producers get from selling stuff to them, because they have had different economic histories, usually with colonial domination and unequal exchanges going back centuries.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

If the latter is excluded, manufacturing’s share of employment in the developing world is lower than it was in the 1980s.53 Manufacturing’s share of the economy peaked in South Korea in 1988 and in Indonesia in 2002.54 There is an inevitable trade-off between wage levels and employment in some of these sectors. As real wages rise, manufacturers either shift location to a country with lower costs, or automate the tasks done by workers. One day, those ladies in the heart of Malaysia will be replaced by a machine. The service sector too will be subject to automation, as call-centre workers are replaced by chatbots and analysts are replaced by artificial intelligence programmes that can conduct research both more quickly and more accurately. Over the next 30 years, we will have to invent a whole new set of tasks to keep us employed. But we have done it before: baristas, personal trainers and social media managers were all virtually unknown 30 years ago

Since then, German unemployment has been well below the European average, although that may be down to the country’s success in exporting capital goods to China and the emerging markets, rather than the reforms themselves.11 Attempts to make the labour market flexible led to a long argument about whether it was better to reduce unemployment, even if the only jobs available had lower wages and reduced rights. In the US, such jobs were found in the fast-food sector or in call centres. The problem was tied up with the general decline in manufacturing employment (see Chapter 7), which meant that most new jobs were created in the service sector. One significant component of economic growth in this period was the addition of women to the workforce. In 1948, just over 30% of American adult women worked, but by 2000, the proportion was 60%.

The roots of the Indian recovery had emerged in the 1980s when Infosys and Wipro, two technology companies, moved to Bangalore. The Bengal province proved attractive to international companies, thanks to a well-educated, English-speaking workforce. A swathe of operations were outsourced to Bangalore, including call centres, insurance processing, tax and audit preparation and IT maintenance.27 The Tata group was another symbol of India’s revival. It had been founded back in 1868 under British rule and opened a steel plant in Jamshedpur in 1912, becoming the largest steel plant in the empire by the Second World War.


pages: 323 words: 95,492

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

Mainstream left-of-centre parties were caught in a different trap post-2008. If they tried to challenge the post-crash consensus that favoured deep spending cuts, they were deemed to be irresponsible and reckless, in proposing spending when borrowing was ‘out of control’. But whereas before 2008, and certainly in the early to mid-1990s, the consensus on the so-called centre ground had been a cosy and electorally fruitful terrain, this new consensus around support for spending cuts was as politically dangerous for the mainstream left as challenging it was. The new orthodoxy, known vaguely as ‘austerity’, appeared to victims of the crash in poorer areas as collusion – almost a conspiracy to continue supporting those who had been responsible for the crash, and punishing those who had not.

Merkel’s CDU party suffered severe setbacks in regional elections, triggering doubts about whether she would, or should, survive much longer. She continued to do so, but with less authority, forced to twist and turn even more than usual in an attempt to appease her right flank, as well as the so-called centre ground. At least Merkel had the fortune, or misfortune, to remain in power. In Australia recent prime ministers would ache for such longevity. Australia was recently served by five prime ministers in five years, a symptom and cause of instability in a tough political culture, where leaders were obliged to seem stronger than they were.


pages: 354 words: 93,882

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

They impose their beliefs on others by force of law, coercion and newspapers, and justify their actions by saying that they have created jobs, or cut costs, or increased spending or made profits for their shareholders. ' Something must be done ! ' is their motto. And they do things, like building skyscrapers, call-centres, dams and motorways, but they also love to interfere with the plans of others - denying planning permission to increase the window size of an old barn by an inch, for example. What is worse is that the botherers, not content with doing things themselves, are constantly trying to force us poor idlers to do things as well.

We hired a nanny and the fun and help she brought to the household meant that we could easily put up with being skint. Q: You say you ' re an idler but you must have put a lot of work into this book. A: Well, I only worked for three or four hours a day on it. So it wasn ' t really like doing eight hours in a call centre. Also, I was working at home, so when you cut out the commuting hours, too, I calculate that I was doing six hours less work a day than the average job-worker. And as it was something I had chosen to do, a hobby, really, it did not feel like work. Of course, there were moments of despair, but by and large I felt lucky and privileged to be reading and writing about a subject I loved.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Even in India, the centre of service and high-tech outsourcing, only a small portion of the labour force works in the information and communication technology sector.115 More importantly, the potential of service jobs is constrained by the newest wave of automation, which is likely to eliminate the low-skilled, low-wage service jobs that have traditionally been outsourced – clerical work, call-centre work or data entry, for example.116 As this non-routine cognitive labour is increasingly automated, what may occur is a premature shift away from a service-based economy – on top of premature deindustrialisation. What this means is that the maintenance of large portions of humanity within slums and informal, non-capitalist economies is likely to be consolidated by emerging technological trends.

The International Labour Organization currently estimates that 5.9 per cent of the working population (201 million people) are unemployed – but this relies on a very stringent definition of unemployment. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook – Trends 2015 (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), at ilo.org, p. 16. If one works for an hour mowing a lawn, makes a few dollars selling homemade wares on a street, or has a doctorate and works in a call centre, the ILO counts this as employment. In other words, part-time workers, informal workers and underemployed workers all count as employed. The ILO definition of unemployment also improves when people drop out of the labour force: a smaller workforce means lower unemployment. A more meaningful measure is therefore the level of employment among the working-age population, according to which the ILO estimates that over 40 per cent of the world’s population is not employed.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

The uneven geographical development that results is as infinitely varied as it is volatile: a deindustrialised city in northern China; a shrinking city in what was once East Germany; the booming industrial cities in the Pearl River delta; an IT concentration in Bangalore; a Special Economic Zone in India where dispossessed peasants revolt; indigenous populations under pressure in Amazonia or New Guinea; the affluent neighbourhoods in Greenwich, Connecticut (until recently, at least, hedge fund capital of the world); the conflict-ridden oil fields in the Ogoni region of Nigeria; the autonomous zones carved out by a militant movement such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; the vast soy bean production zones in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina; the rural regions of Darfur or the Congo where civil wars relentlessly rage; the staid middle-class suburbs of London, Los Angeles or Munich; the shanty towns of South Africa; the garment factories of Sri Lanka or the call centres of Barbados and Bangalore ‘manned’ entirely by women; the new megacities in the Gulf States with their star-architect-designed buildings – all of this (and of course much more) when taken together constitutes a world of geographical difference that has been made by human action. At first blush, this world would appear to be so geographically diverse as to escape principled understanding, let alone rationalised control.

The civil wars in Africa, in many ways sad legacies of European colonial practices, reflect the long history of corporate and state-led struggles to control Africa’s valued resources, with China these days an increasingly important player. The factory in northern China or Ohio closes down in part because the factories in the Pearl River delta open up. The call centre in Barbados or Bangalore services customers in Ohio and London and the shirts or skirts worn in Paris have labels from Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, just as the shoes that were once made in Italy now come from Vietnam. The Gulf States build spectacular buildings on the back of an oil trade that depends in part on the profligate use of energy to service a predominantly suburban lifestyle in the United States.


Egypt by Matthew Firestone

call centre, clean water, credit crunch, friendly fire, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Right to Buy, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban sprawl, young professional

POST As well as the main post office, postboxes are also outside Ghazala Supermarket and next to Red Sea Relax Terrace Restaurant, both in Masbat. Main post office (Dahab City; 8.30am-2.30pm) TELEPHONE In addition to the Telephone centrale and cardphones, you will find numerous call centres along the beachfront in Assalah where you can dial internationally for a few pounds a minute. Phonecards are sold at the Ghazala Supermarket in Masbat and at most small shops. Call centre (Masbat; per min E£7; 10am-3pm & 6-9pm Sat-Thu, 3-9pm Fri) Telephone centrale (Dahab City; 24hr) Dangers & Annoyances Although Dahab is one of the most relaxed destinations in Egypt, be advised that there is the potential for a future terrorist attack.

DHL (Map; 485 1911; 9 Sharia Salah Salem; 9am-5pm Sat-Thu) Express Mail Service (EMS; 8.30am-3pm Sat-Thu) At all post offices. Main post office (Map; Sharia al-Bursa al-Qadima; 9am-9pm Sat-Thu) Telephone Menatel cardphones can be found all over the city, although the policy of placing them on street corners can make it hard to hear and be heard. Private call centres are everywhere, and are a much more convenient option. You can also buy an inexpensive cash line for your mobile; to work with a local SIM, your phone must be quad-band and unlocked. Telephone centrale (Map; Sharia Saad Zaghloul; 8.30am-10pm) Vodafone (Map; 68 Sharia Safiyya Zaghloul; 8.30am-10pm) Inside Radio Shack; sells cash (prepaid) SIM cards for E£20.

Western Union (Map; 364 0466; Rosetta Hotel, Na’ama Bay; 8.30am-2pm & 6-10pm Sat-Thu, 3-10pm Fri) POST Main post office (Map; Bank St, Hadaba; 8.30am-2.30pm Sat-Thu) TELEPHONE There are several cardphones in Na’ama Bay and at least two on the beachfront promenade. Cards can be bought everywhere, but watch out for overcharging by shopkeepers. There are also several call centres where you can dial internationally for E£4 to E£7 per minute. Telephone centrale (Map; Bank St, Hadaba; 24hr). Dangers & Annoyances In July 2005, three terrorist bombs exploded in Sharm el-Sheikh, killing 88 people and injuring over 200. The worst damage was in the Sharm Old Market area and near Ghazala Gardens hotel in Na’ama Bay.


pages: 362 words: 87,462

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demand response, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, financial independence, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, Google Chrome, helicopter parent, impulse control, Jean Tirole, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, meta-analysis, Minecraft, New Journalism, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, working poor

Milkman, David A. Hofmann, and Bradley R. Staats, “The Impact of Time at Work and Time Off from Work on Rule Compliance: The Case of Hand Hygiene in Health Care,” Journal of Applied Psychology 100, no. 3 (2015): 846–62. 47. Stephen Deery, Roderick Iverson, and Janet Walsh, “Work Relationships in Telephone Call Centres: Understanding Emotional Exhaustion and Employee Withdrawal,” Journal of Management Studies 39, no. 4 (June 2002): 471–96. 48. Ken J. Gilhooly, George Georgiou, and Ultan Devery, “Incubation and Creativity: Do Something Different,” Thinking & Reasoning 19, no. 2 (2013): 137–49. 49. Renzo Bianchi, Eric Laurent, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Lucas M.

We become more irritable and are easily distracted by things like random background noise.43 We get sloppier and more prone to errors, whether they’re as simple and low-stakes as making more typos44 or as catastrophic as a doctor making a mistake in the middle of surgery.45 Tiredness even makes us more apathetic about doing our jobs in the right way. A study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found when health care workers (such as doctors and nurses) are exhausted from working long shifts, they lose the motivation to follow basic hygiene rules and cut back on how often they wash their hands.46 A survey of 450 call-center employees found that the more tired and overwhelmed an employee became, the more they tended to withdraw emotionally from their jobs, and the less likely they were to show up for work.47 Work fatigue also kills creativity. In the previous chapter, I described how creative insight requires a period of incubation, a restful break that allows the creative mind to unconsciously come up with new ideas and solutions.48 The flip side of the incubation phenomenon is also true: when people don’t get access to breaks and “lazy” time, they think in more conventional, uncreative ways, and are more likely to get stuck.

Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, no. 37 (September 2009): 15583–87. 44. Lori Sideman Goldberg and Alicia A. Grandey, “Display Rules versus Display Autonomy: Emotion Regulation, Emotional Exhaustion, and Task Performance in a Call Center Simulation,” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 12, no. 3 (July 2007): 301–18. 45. Jelle T. Prins, F. M. M. A. van der Heijden, Josette Hoekstra-Weebers, A. B. Bakker, Harry B. M. van de Wiel, B. Jacobs, and S. M. Gazendam-Donofrio, “Burnout, Engagement and Resident Physicians’ Self-Reported Errors,” Psychology Health and Medicine 14, no. 6 (December 2009): 654–66. 46.


pages: 338 words: 100,477

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds by Kevin Dutton

availability heuristic, Bernie Madoff, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, credit crunch, different worldview, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, equity premium, fundamental attribution error, haute couture, job satisfaction, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Milgram experiment, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile

If so, then despite all the flashy, trashy merchandising your impression of the product is negative. It’s an impression of low demand and poor sales. Why the hell would you want to buy it if nobody else does? Now ask yourself this. What comes to mind when you hear the phrase ‘If operators are busy, please call again’? A buzzing call centre full of overstretched staff struggling to keep pace with demand? Now that’s more like it! If everyone else is getting in on the action – then you’re sure as hell not going to miss out! 18Exactly the same principle works on eBay. Analysis of online auctions reveals something primal, profound and fundamentally potty about consumer behaviour: if you want to flog that Rembrandt you found in the attic, start at $10!

Preaching, lecturing, pleading and bullying are about as useful in the showroom as a snooze button on a smoke alarm. Instead, just like Pat Reynolds, the successful salesperson treads carefully. Just look, for a moment, at the way Reynolds operates. For all his bravado and roguish streetwise charm, he’s a serious player. Not everyone who works in a call centre learns to fly on the proceeds. Nor do they roll off a gleaming garage forecourt in a top-of-the-range convertible. He makes an awful lot of money where an awful lot of people simply go under. And how? By reverting to first principles. To a time when persuasion had yet to hit on language. By releasing from the depths of human evolution one of the most powerful genies of influence known to man: the principle of reciprocity. 10Robert Cialdini, Regents’ Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, has shown precisely how powerful the pull of reciprocity is, how rightful its place in the arsenal of the elite persuader, in a study that (on the surface, at least) looked at individual differences in altruism.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

According to this standard reading of the scheme of ‘social grades’, the middle includes everyone in ‘white-collar’ work, from clerical workers to professionals, supervisors, and senior managers. This, surely, is an illusory levelling, as if to say that everyone who works in a call centre, from the receptionist to the chief executive, is ‘middle class’. But the world evoked in this conception of class isn’t really the modern world, where there even are such things as call centres. It is a world in which workers use their hands and leave the brain-work to their social betters. Therefore, as long as you don’t use your hands, or if you have a degree, you can be patronisingly called ‘middle class’ even when you’re working precarious shifts for minimum wage.


Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The Comune di Roma (city council) runs a free multilingual tourist information line ( 06 06 08; www.060608.it; 9am-9pm), providing information on culture, shows, hotels, transport etc; you can also book theatre, concert, exhibition and museum tickets on this number. If you need practical information, the city’s free 06 06 06 number is incredibly useful. By calling it you reach a Comune di Roma call centre that’s been set up to answer practical questions about anything to do with Comune-related services. The centre is staffed 24 hours and there are English-, French-, Arabic-, German-, Spanish-, Italian- and Chinese-speaking staff available from 4pm to 7pm. They can answer any question along the lines of :Where’s the nearest hospital?

It covers admission to most of Turin’s monuments and museums, a ride up the Mole Antonelliana panoramic lift, a return trip on the Sassi-Superga cable car, and all public transport costs including GTT boats on the Po river and the Turismo Bus Torino (Click here). It also offers discounts for some guided tours and theatres. You can buy the card at the tourist office. * * * POST Post office (Via Alfieri 10; 8.30am-7pm Mon-Fri, to 1pm Sat) TOURIST INFORMATION The tourist board’s call centre ( 011 53 51 81; www.turismotorino.org; 9.30am-9.30pm) can provide updated information and assistance for visitors. Circolo Culturale Maurice ( 011 521 11 16; www.mauriceglbt.org, in Italian; Via della Basilica 3-5) Gay and lesbian information. Tourist office ( 011 53 51 81; 9.30am-7pm) At Stazione Porta Nuova; offers a free accommodation and restaurant booking service.

To get here take tram 15 from Piazza Vittorio Veneto to the Sassi-Superga stop on Corso Casale, then walk 20m to Stazione Sassi ( 011 576 47 33; Strada Comunale di Superga 4), from where an original 1934 tram (one-way/return Mon-Fri Sat & Sun €2/4 €3.50/5.50; from Sassi 9am-noon & 2-8pm Mon, Wed, Thu & Fri, 9.30am-12.30pm & 2.30-8.30pm Sat & Sun, 30min later from Superga, closed Tue) rattles the 3.1km up the hillside in 18 minutes. Tours Guided walking tours (€6.50-8) following changing themes, such as Literary Turin, Tasty Turin and so on, depart on Saturday at 6pm. General city tours leave at 10am on Saturdays. Tours generally last around 1½ hours. Contact the tourist board call centre Click here to confirm departure points, and to ask about various factory tours that are also available. Turismo Bus Torino (1-day ticket adult/child €5/3; 10am-6pm Sat & Sun Jan-Jun & mid-Sep—mid-Dec, 10am-6pm daily Jul—mid-Sep & holiday-festival periods) is a hop-on, hop-off bus service with an on-board staff member providing information, and serves over a dozen different points around central Turin.


pages: 312 words: 35,664

The Mathematics of Banking and Finance by Dennis W. Cox, Michael A. A. Cox

backpropagation, barriers to entry, Brownian motion, call centre, correlation coefficient, fixed income, G4S, inventory management, iterative process, linear programming, meta-analysis, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, random walk, traveling salesman, value at risk

It may then be classified into categories or groups. Each individual event is normally referred to as an observation. In this context observations may be grouped into multiples of a single unit, for example: r The number of transactions in a queue r The number of orders received r The number of calls taken in a call centre. Since discrete data can only take integer values, this is the simplest type of data that a firm may want to present pictorially. Consider the following example: A company has obtained the following data on the number of repairs required annually on the 550 personal computers (PCs) registered on their fixed asset ledger.

What this means is that in at least 81.8% of the samples there would be between six and 12 errors, on the assumption that the distribution is normal (8, 4) so has a mean of eight and a variance of four. 8.2.2 A second example of normal probabilities A company assumes that the quality criteria for a call centre is normally distributed with a failure mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 0.03. In this context failure represents not achieving the required quality standard. (a) What is the proportion of samples that will have a failure rate exceeding 10.075? x −μ Using z = , the required probability is: σ 10.075 − 10 Prob(x > 10.075) = Prob z > 0.03 = Prob(z > 2.5) = Prob(z < −2.5) (by symmetry) = 0.006 This therefore gives 0.6% as the proportion.


pages: 208 words: 37,561

Manage Your Home Build & Renovation Project: How to Create Your Dream Home on Time, in Budget and Without Stress by David Cambridge

business process, call centre

FURTHER RESOURCES The Planning Portal – The Government site providing advice and information relating to the planning process. http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/planning/ Department for Communities and Local Government – www.communities.gov.uk Federation of Master Builders – www.fmb.org.uk Gas Safe Register – www.gassaferegister.co.uk Health & Safety Executive – www.hse.gov.uk National House Building Council (NHBC) – www.nhbc.co.uk National Self Build & Renovation Centre – www.buildstore.co.uk Royal institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) – www.rics.org Royal institute of British Architects (RIBA) – www.architecture.com About the Author David has been in the construction industry since he left school some 30 years ago. Originally he trained as an engineer but moved into project and building management. He has been involved in a large range of construction projects including museums, galleries, hospitals, data centres, offices and call centres as well as residential works. Now the owner of The Residential Project Manager Limited, David spends most of his time helping home owners and property developers to deliver a mixture of loft conversions, extensions, refurbishments and new builds. Having been in the commercial industry for a long time he now enjoys helping local people deliver their dreams.


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

There is, obviously, a lot of monopoly pricing going on in the US case relative to that of Belgium (almost certainly due to different state regulatory policies). Personal services of this sort have remained partially immune from spatial competition in spite of the rise of medical tourism and the outsourcing of many services to call centres like those in India. These protected markets may crumble, however, in the face of the application of artificial intelligence. Capital is, we can conclude, in love with monopoly. It prefers the certainties, the quiet life and the possibility of leisurely and cautious changes that go with a monopolistic style of working and living outside of the rough and tumble of competition.

., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?


pages: 387 words: 119,244

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, call centre, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Thorp, Etonian, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, interest rate swap, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, pets.com, proprietary trading, Red Clydeside, shareholder value, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, value at risk, warehouse robotics

As recently as April 2007, on the eve of the ABN Amro bid, the bank’s shares had been worth more than 600p. The collapse represented a terrible, calamitous destruction of wealth. Hundreds of thousands of retirement nest eggs had vanished. In the weeks after the collapse Alan Dickinson and several of his colleagues toured the branches and call centres, offering bewildered and mutinous staff a chance to take it out on someone from the management. One RBS cashier, close to retirement, explained quietly to Dickinson that year after year over the decades she had invested in RBS stock every time it was offered to her. Not long ago her carefully husbanded investment had been worth almost £250,000, and now a mere fraction of that was left.

Big financial failures can have massive collateral damage, which is why we need a strong banking system and effective regulation.’ A total of 41,000 of the bank’s employees, in the UK and abroad, have been laid off since 2008. It has not been easy for many of those who kept their jobs either. The vast majority of the bank’s staff are not traders, or leverage finance merchants, they are people working hard in branches, call centres and back offices for modest remuneration. Perhaps it will come as some consolation to former staff that Goodwin lost at least £7m. That includes his losses on the shares which he held on to until the crash and the loss of the pay-off he was legally entitled to demand but gave up. George Mathewson was also hit, to the tune of more than £5m it is suggested.


Nepal Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land reform, load shedding, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Australian Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade (www.smartraveller.gov.au) Canadian Consular Affairs (www.voyage.gc.ca) New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade (www.safetravel.govt.nz) UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (www.fco.gov.uk/travel) US Department of State (http://travel.state.gov/travel) Telephone The phone system in Nepal works pretty well (as long as the electricity is working) and making local, STD and international calls is easy. Reverse-charge (collect) calls can only be made to the UK, USA, Canada and Japan. Private call centres offer the cheapest and most convenient way to make a call. Look for signs advertising STD/ISD services. Many hotels offer international direct-dial facilities but always check their charges before making a call. Private call centres charge around Rs 10 to 40 per minute to most countries. Internet phone calls are cheaper, costing around Rs 10 per minute (calls to mobile phones are often more expensive), but these are only available in Kathmandu and Pokhara.

Most internet cafes offer internet phone calls through Skype (www.skype.com) for a couple of rupees per minute on top of their normal internet rates. Local phone calls cost around Rs 5 per minute, with long-distance domestic calls costing around Rs 10 per minute. Out in rural areas you may find yourself using someone’s mobile phone at a public call centre. Mobile Phones Ncell ( 9809005000; www.ncell.com.np) is the most popular and convenient provider. To get a SIM card take a copy of your passport and one photo to an Ncell office. A SIM card costs Rs 99, with local calls around Rs 2 per minute and incoming calls free. International calls cost from Rs 2 (the US) to Rs 15 (UK) per minute.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

While there has tended to be more unemployment due to automation in sectors in which men dominate such as manufacturing, construction and installation, the increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence and the ability to digitize tasks in service industries indicate that a wide range of jobs are at risk, from positions at call centres in emerging markets (the source of livelihoods for large numbers of young female workers who are the first in their families to work) to retail and administrative roles in developed economies (a key employer for lower-middle class women). Losing a job has negative effects in many circumstances, but the cumulative effect of significant losses across whole job categories that have traditionally given women access to the labour market is a critical concern.


pages: 174 words: 42,316

Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty Wiper Blades. We Should Get Them.: A Collection of New Essays by David Thorne

call centre

She looked like a gothic Teletubbie. “Is your girlfriend a Goth?” I’d asked Simon the first time I saw the photo. “No dickhead, she’s a wicken.” “A what?” “She practices Wicca. It’s a modern religion based on pagan rituals.” “Right, so she’s an unemployed Art’s graduate then.” “No, she works in a call centre.” “Did you stop for a photo opportunity on the way to a forest-clearing candle dance?” “No, it was my Grandpa’s funeral.” Apparently Cathy had written and read a poem for the service. Simon showed me the folded A4 program they gave out to those attending. Below a photo of an old man holding a shovel, the poem read; Cry not.


pages: 277 words: 41,815

Lonely Planet Pocket Berlin by Lonely Planet, Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, messenger bag, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

› Don’t be late for meetings and dinner invitations. › Don’t talk about WWII with a victor’s mentality. › Don’t assume you can pay by credit card, especially when eating out. Tourist Information The local tourist board, Visit Berlin (www.visitberlin.de), operates three walk-in offices (listed following) and a call centre ( 250 025; 9am-7pm Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm Sat, 10am-2pm Sun) whose multilingual staff field general questions and make hotel and ticket bookings. From April to October extended hours may apply. Brandenburg Gate ( 10am-7pm; U-/S-Bahn Brandenburger Tor) In the south wing. Hauptbahnhof ( 8am-10pm; U-/S-Bahn Hauptbahnhof) Near the Europaplatz north exit.


pages: 118 words: 42,837

Coal Black Mornings by Brett Anderson

British Empire, call centre, Martin Parr

The line about the ‘ashtray eyes and boot-lace ties’ was a reference to Ian Dury’s ‘Sweet Gene Vincent’, a song we used to play until the grooves wore out, and the picture it paints of two young people fumbling around the beginnings of feeling set against the back-drop of an unfamiliar city’s coal-black winter still manages to stir something in me and takes me back to a sweet forgotten corner of my youth. Looking for work one day in the local job centre, I saw advertised amongst the sea of vacancies at call centres and thinly disguised positions as sex workers a job as a DJ in a local nightspot. It was a place called the Cyprus Tavern, a sticky-floored, subterranean cellar bar on Princess Street, which was at the time home to frightening packs of football fans and herds of belligerent single young men pointedly looking for trouble.


Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

In this context, attempts by local authorities to regenerate areas devastated by the loss of manufacturing industries, and the jobs they brought, were too often based on business models that looked towards multinational corporations or large chain retailers to benevolently bestow inward investment. Frequently this “investment” would consist of call centres or distribution warehouses offering poor and insecure working conditions and wages just above the poverty line, failing to offer any deep and sustainable improvement to these areas. In other cases, planning was led by property developers who prioritised their own profits over the social or economic benefits their project could bring to an area, and frequently over-promised on what they could deliver, which did little to instil public confidence in these models.


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

Cognitive intelligence has already produced adequate natural language translators. Intelligent agents, such as Apple’s Siri, will understand more and more about what people say, and might even become capable of producing useful replies. It would not be that difficult to produce responses that are no worse than the average third world telephone call centre. Medical expert systems will check diagnoses and medications, and a taxation expert might even be able to gain a basic understanding of the otherwise impenetrable tax laws. One of the last jobs that an AI will probably be able to do effectively is write complex computer programs. That is because that is one of the most cognitively difficult things that we do as humans.

Today the results are mixed, but this is also a huge, ongoing area of research, so it will not be long before automated systems can perform the basic functions provided by telephone consultants. And just as with Siri, people will learn how to phrase their questions so that a semi-intelligent automated system can understand them. They will never be as good as talking to an expert, but they could easily become as ineffective as talking to someone in a third world call centre. In combination, these technologies will change the world. Vast amounts of data will be available that describe every aspect of our lives. That may or may not be advantageous to ordinary citizens. That said, it is very unlikely that semi-intelligent computers will be able to perform the high-level thinking that is performed by professionals such as engineers, lawyers or senior bureaucrats.


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

While ensuring that people’s anger was directed at immigrants – rather than, say, the City, poverty-paying employers or tax-avoiders – UKIP supported policies that could only benefit the wealthy. Until 2014, the party proposed a flat income tax, which would not only slash the amount of tax that the wealthy pay, but would leave call-centre workers in the same tax bracket as billionaires. Although they eventually U-turned over the policy, UKIP still advocated cutting the top rate of tax. The party wants the abolition of employers’ National Insurance contributions, which would hand bosses a breathtaking £50 billion. They advocate the cutting of 2 million public-sector jobs, which would decimate entire communities.

Democracy in the workplace would also shift the balance of power away from bosses. In Germany, workers elect representatives who promote their interests on company boards, or ‘co-determination’ as it is called. If it is good enough for German workers, it is surely good enough for British workers, and would give them a voice in their supermarkets, call centres, offices and other places of work, instead of treating them as chattels to be exploited. It would need to be complemented by other policies to stop workers being reduced to hire-and-fire fodder to be disposed of at will by employers, such as scrapping zero-hour contracts. An official policy of building full employment is also critical, which has the advantage of best guaranteeing the negotiating power of labour.


pages: 468 words: 124,573

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

Once again, that is integrated into the OS, and took significant effort on Apple’s part to make it a reality (think negotiations with every individual mobile network operator). The last serious attempt at a voicemail startup was Spinvox. Despite blowing through $100 million of venture capital,11 everything ended in tears when it was discovered that its speech-to-text technology was little more than overworked call-centre employees transcribing the audio messages themselves.12,13 Voicemail as we know it is probably not a great opportunity, but the broader messaging arena is where the action is proving to be. OTHER MISCELLANEOUS USES, 10 TIMES PER DAY: This catch-all category represents a good 6 per cent of all interactions with mobile phones.

In the world of fast-moving technology your advantage is not the hardware (that’s owned by Apple or Samsung or someone else): rather it is the software you create, the experience and emotion that the software delivers, and the supporting experiences, such as customer service. All of this is created and delivered by people. Not just engineers, designers and product people, but also people in call centres, the support teams answering emails and the people within the marketing, operational and administrative roles. Making sure that each and every one of these people is excited to get up and come to work every day is what great CEOs of great companies do. And they accomplish that with culture. Culture at Scale You need to be deliberate in creating – and then preserving – your culture, even in the early days.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Growing up in Easton, everyone was socioeconomically the same. Of the same class, I suppose. What I saw that night in that pub was different. It was rich, privileged people dipping their toe in an area they knew nothing about, before retreating to pristine Clifton, and it just hit me differently.’ Henry had also worked as an Uber driver and in a Bristol call centre. He told of customers getting into his car and saying, ‘So, that’s the famous Bristol accent I’ve heard so much about!’ and of callers who couldn’t believe that his was real when he spoke. When we met, Henry was earning approximately £16,000 a year and could not afford to move out of his mum’s Victorian two-bedroom house – a rare and stable long-term social tenancy which she had had since 2010 – in Speedwell, near Whitehall.

This shift had led the soon-to-become Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to declare as early as 1997 that ‘we are all middle class now’, and indeed it was a notion that underpinned New Labour’s ‘big tent’ philosophy. It was a nice idea, but it just wasn’t true. As we can see now, we clearly still have a working class – construction workers, supermarket workers, cleaners, farm labourers, carers, hospital porters, Uber drivers, call centre workers, Amazon workers and Deliveroo riders – some of whom are economic migrants and the majority of whom are on zero-hours contracts. These low-income workers are, as a result, the people most likely to live in poor-quality, overcrowded, unstable and sometimes illegal housing. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) said that at the end of 2020 there was about a million workers on zero-hours contracts.


pages: 184 words: 46,395

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

active measures, behavioural economics, call centre, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Firefox, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Kickstarter, loss aversion, nudge unit, Ocado, placebo effect, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, TED Talk, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, World Values Survey

Think like a consumer Another solution is more insight work. Most of us agree with this in principle, but in practice it happens too rarely as it’s perceived as devilishly expensive. But insights spring from simple techniques as well as complex ones whether that’s interviewing consumers in their homes, spending a day listening in at a call centre, or working in-store for a week. The ideal solution is to create a bespoke technique for the problem in hand. For example, when working on a brief for a male incontinence brand I wanted to help the agency team involved understand the target audience. We had no budget for this so we used a technique we call method planning.


Canary Islands Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

AltaVista, call centre, carbon footprint, G4S, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, low cost airline, urban sprawl

Boxes & Cigars CIGARS (Calle Tomás Miller 80) If it’s cigars you’re after, this place has a dazzling range on offer, with the boxes just about as attractive as the smokes. Information Internet Access Due to the large number of immigrants in Las Palmas, the city is awash with internet cafes, generally located within locutorios (telephone call centres), which also offer cheap international calls. Wi-fi is increasingly available at midrange and top-end hotels, and occasionally at public spaces and in town centres. Money For the highest concentration of banks with 24-hour ATM machines head for Calle José Franchy Roca, just south of Parque Santa Catalina.

Phone Codes »Mobile phone numbers start with 6 »International access code 00 »Canary Islands country code 34 (same as Spain) »Island area codes Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura 928; »Tenerife, La Gomera, La Palma and El Hierro 922 »National toll-free number 900 Phonecards You can buy phonecards at tobacco stands, newsstands and at the locutorios (private call centres). In any case, there is an endless variety of phonecards, each with its own pricing scheme. The best card for you will depend on where you plan to call. Time The Canary Islands are on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT/UTC), plus an hour in summer for daylight-saving time. The islands keep the same time as the UK, Ireland and Portugal and are always an hour behind mainland Spain and most of Europe.


pages: 140 words: 91,067

Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA by Tonny K. Omwansa, Nicholas P. Sullivan, The Guardian

Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, cashless society, cloud computing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, democratizing finance, digital divide, disruptive innovation, end-to-end encryption, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, income per capita, Kibera, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, Network effects, new economy, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, software as a service, tontine, transaction costs

Further, there is no incentive for a merchant to defraud his or her customers, because the merchant would almost instantly be out of business. Customers can call Safaricom’s customer service number (234), where Safaricom has a record of all transactions (of the roughly 300 Safaricom employees dedicated to M-PESA, the vast majority work at the call centre, according to Betty Mwangi). There is, recent events indicate, more danger that scam artists will defraud merchants (who have more money on their phones than customers) by posing as authorities than merchants will defraud customers. Building a nation-wide network of trusted agents who are all independent operators requires a complex balancing act that never quite reaches a steadystate equilibrium.


pages: 172 words: 50,777

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

This is the third shift of the Nowhere Office, the impact this moment is having on both raw productivity and the more nuanced issue of ‘purpose’ itself. The Pitch of Frenzy It is notoriously hard to quantify productivity, hence the way economists refer to the ‘productivity puzzle’. Clearly what counts as productive in a call centre is different to measuring the outcome of creativity in an advertising agency. The inherent time delay between the start of a project and its completion is often where the problem of being able to measure meaningfully what is ‘productive’ lies. I’m thinking for instance of the gap between someone writing a legal or policy paper and its eventual outcome in court or in a new law.


Lonely Planet Eastern Europe by Lonely Planet, Mark Baker, Tamara Sheward, Anita Isalska, Hugh McNaughtan, Lorna Parkes, Greg Bloom, Marc Di Duca, Peter Dragicevich, Tom Masters, Leonid Ragozin, Tim Richards, Simon Richmond

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, low cost airline, mass immigration, pre–internet, Steve Jobs, the High Line, Transnistria, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Pirogov Hospital ( GOOGLE MAP ; %emergency 02-915 4411; www.pirogov.bg; bul General Totleben 21; j4, 5) Sofia’s main public hospital for emergencies. 8Getting There & Away Air Sofia Airport ( GOOGLE MAP ; %info 24hr 02-937 2211; www.sofia-airport.bg; off bul Brussels; W; g84, mSofia Airport) is 10km east of the city centre. The only domestic flights within Bulgaria are between Sofia and the Black Sea coast. Bulgaria Air ( GOOGLE MAP ; %call centre 02-402 0400; www.air.bg; ul Ivan Vazov 2; h9.30am-noon & 12.30pm-5.30pm Mon-Fri; mSerdika) flies daily to Varna, with two or three daily flights between July and September; the airline also flies to Burgas. Bus Sofia's central bus station (Tsentralna Avtogara; GOOGLE MAP ; %info 0900 63 099; www.centralnaavtogara.bg; bul Maria Luisa 100; h24hr; W; mCentral Railway Station) is beside the train station and accessed by the same metro stop.

Seneca Anticafe ( GOOGLE MAP ; %0720-331 100; www.senecanticafe.ro; Str Arhitect Ion Mincu 1; per hr 8 lei; h9am-10pm; W; j24, 42, 45) Coffee and internet access. 8Getting There & Away Air All international and domestic flights use Henri Coandă International Airport (OTP, Otopeni; GOOGLE MAP ; %arrivals 021-204 1220, departures 021-204 1210; www.bucharestairports.ro; Şos Bucureşti-Ploieşti; g783), often referred to by its previous name, Otopeni. Henri Coandă is 17km north of Bucharest on the road to Braşov. The airport is a modern facility, with restaurants, newsagents, currency exchange offices and ATMs. It's also the hub for national carrier Tarom ( GOOGLE MAP ; %call centre 021-204 6464, office 021-316 0220; www.tarom.ro; Spl Independenţei 17, City Centre; h9am-5pm Mon-Fri; mPiaţa Unirii). Tarom has a comprehensive network of internal flights to major Romanian cities as well as to capitals and big cities around Europe and the Middle East. Bus It’s possible to get just about anywhere in the country by bus from Bucharest, but figuring out where your bus or maxitaxi departs from can be tricky.

Bus Long-haul bus services remain a popular way of travelling from Romania to Western Europe as well as to parts of southeastern Europe and Turkey. Bus travel is comparable in price to train travel, but can be faster and require fewer connections. Bus services to and from Western Europe are dominated by two companies: Eurolines (www.eurolines.ro) and Atlassib ( GOOGLE MAP ; %021-222 8971, call centre 080-10 100 100; www.atlassib.ro; Str Gheorghe Duca 4; mGara de Nord). Both maintain vast networks from cities throughout Europe to destinations all around Romania. Check the companies' websites for the latest schedules, prices and departure points. For sample prices, a one-way ticket from Vienna to Bucharest costs roughly €70.


pages: 174 words: 56,405

Machine Translation by Thierry Poibeau

Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, AltaVista, augmented reality, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, geopolitical risk, Google Glasses, information retrieval, Internet of things, language acquisition, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, natural language processing, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, seminal paper, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, technological singularity, Turing test, wikimedia commons

In France, the interest was clear from the late 1950s on, and two centers were then created by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), in Paris and Grenoble. The interest in machine translation was simultaneous with the first computers intended for university centers in France, and was, therefore, the real beginning of computer science in the country. The two centers were called Centre d’Études sur la Traduction Automatique, or CETA: CETAP was located in Paris, and CETAG in Grenoble. The Parisian center encountered financial problems from very early on and had to bear the consequences of the criticism of machine translation that was emerging in the United States. In fact, the center closed a few years later and some researchers, such as Maurice Gross, turned to computational linguistics, stressing the need to first develop rich linguistic resources that offer a broad and systematic description of language.


pages: 928 words: 159,837

Florence & Tuscany by Lonely Planet

Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, European colonialism, haute couture, Kickstarter, period drama, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, retail therapy, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning

As elsewhere in Europe, Italians choose from a host of providers of phone plans and rates, making it difficult to make generalisations about costs. International Calls The cheapest options for calling internationally are free or low-cost computer programs such as Skype, cut-rate call centres or international calling cards, which are sold at news-stands and tobacconists. Cut-price call centres can be found in all of the main cities, and rates can be considerably lower than from Telecom payphones for international calls. You simply place your call from a private booth inside the centre and pay for it when you’ve finished. Direct international calls can also easily be made from public telephones with a phonecard.


pages: 525 words: 153,356

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 by Selina Todd

"there is no alternative" (TINA), call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, different worldview, Downton Abbey, financial independence, full employment, income inequality, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Red Clydeside, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, sexual politics, strikebreaker, The Spirit Level, unemployed young men, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

During the 1990s and 2000s, the richest 10 per cent – a group of business leaders, corporate professionals, financiers, press barons and aristocrats – enjoyed far bigger rises in their income than any other group. In 1998 they possessed more than a quarter of Britain’s income. By 2008 they owned one-third of it. Meanwhile, the least wealthy half of society – millions of pensioners, manual workers, call centre and care home staff, nurses, teaching assistants, cleaners and office workers, as well as those who couldn’t find work or were sick – lived on less than one-quarter of the national income.2 Rising inequality made people unhealthy and unhappy. In their meticulously researched The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett reveal that as economic inequality increased, so too did anxiety disorders and depression.

All were in salaried, non-manual positions with impressive titles: they were consultants, administrators and sales executives. Thirty years earlier, 55 per cent of workers had been employed in manual jobs; by the millennium, more than 70 per cent of workers were employed in non-manual work, commonly in sales positions in cafés and call centres, or as data inputters in offices.28 They dressed in smart suits, sported sharp haircuts and most owned at least one car. None was a senior professional (defined by the Census as doctors, academics, politicians, financiers and barristers), but none was unemployed either. Half of them had grown up in council or privately rented houses or flats, but only one of them now lived in rented accommodation.


pages: 874 words: 154,810

Lonely Planet Florence & Tuscany by Lonely Planet, Virginia Maxwell, Nicola Williams

Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Costa Concordia, G4S, haute couture, Kickstarter, period drama, post-work, retail therapy, Skype, trade route

As elsewhere in Europe, Italians choose from a host of providers of phone plans and rates, making it difficult to make generalisations about costs. International Calls The cheapest options for calling internationally are free or low-cost computer programs such as Skype, cut-rate call centres or international calling cards, which are sold at newsstands and tabacchi. Cut-price call centres can be found in all of the main cities, and rates can be considerably lower than from Telecom Italia payphones for international calls. You simply place your call from a private booth inside the centre and pay for it when you’ve finished. Direct international calls can also easily be made from public telephones with a phonecard.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

This is done for any number of reasons: to maximize profitability (withdrawing services from ‘failed’ or unprofitable consumers; profiling neighbourhoods as geo-demographic groups); to customize or personalize services (tailored amazon.com Web pages); to allow premium users to by-pass congestion (road-priced highways; differential call-centre queueing based on records of customers’ profitability; the ‘prioritized’ switching of Internet packages); to support new means of individualized risk management.26 Because these new trends of digitized consumption and tracking straddle the inside and the outside of the nation-state, they interlock with and facilitate broader shifts towards securocratic war.

The bombing of Moscow metro cars by Chechen terrorists in February 2004 and the gassing of Tokyo’s underground railways by the Aum Shinrikyo group in March 1995 also exploited everyday mobility systems to murderous effect. In India, meanwhile, as part of a recent spate of urban atrocities, terrorists have sometimes deliberately targeted the electricity systems that supply the high-tech enclaves which house the city’s well-known global software and call-centre industries.15 Such attacks have raised widespread anxiety about the vulnerabilities of all manner of basic infrastructures that, by definition, pervade the everyday life of every modern urbanite (Figure 8.1). The mailings of anthrax spores, for example, were acts perpetrated through the US postal system in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and killed five people.


Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough by Clive Hamilton, Richard Denniss

call centre, death from overwork, delayed gratification, experimental subject, full employment, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mega-rich, Naomi Klein, Own Your Own Home, post-materialism, post-work, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, wage slave, work culture

CHAPTER 5 1 Reserve Bank of Australia, ‘Household debt: what the data show’, Reserve Bank of Australia Bulletin, RBA, Sydney, March 2003, Table 1. 2 National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, ‘Household debt in Australia—walking the tightrope’, AMP.NATSEM Income and Wealth Report, issue 9, NATSEM, Canberra, November 2004, Table 8. 3 Inspector-General in Bankruptcy, Annual Report, 2003–2004, Insolvency and Trustee Service of Australia, Canberra, 2004. 4 Dun and Bradstreet, ‘D&B expands call centre capacity with Datacom to meet growth in debt business’, 9 July 2002, <www.dnb.com/about/media/press/> [11 January 2005]. 5 Insolvency and Trustee Service of Australia, Annual reports, various issues, ITSA, Canberra. 6 Paul Brennan (Citigroup), cited in Matt Wade, ‘Exports a chink in Howard’s economic armour’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September 2004. 201 AFFLUENZA 7 Don Harding, Matt Hammill, Anne Leahy and Peter Summers, ING – Melbourne Institute Household Saving Report, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne, June quarter 2001, pp. 6–7. 8 National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, op. cit., Figure 12.


pages: 162 words: 56,627

Top 10 Venice by Gillian Price

call centre, centre right, G4S, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Murano, Venice glass

Venice ( Pocket Another useful free three-monthly bilingual magazine that lists exhibitions, not to mention bars and eateries all around town. ) Websites As well as the Tourist Board sites (see directory), www.meeting For entertainment in Venice See pp66–7 venice.it and www.a guestinvenice.com in Italian and English are excellent sources of information and have an incredible number and array of useful links for in-depth exploration. Tourist Offices Venice www.turismovenezia.it • 041 529 8711 (call centre) Ferrovia S Lucia (railway station) • 041 529 8727 Piazza S Marco 71/f • 041 529 8740 Venice Pavilion • Giardinetti Reali, S Marco 2 • 041 522 5150 Piazzale Roma, Garage Comunale • 041 529 8746 Airport • 041 541 5887 Gran Viale 6, Lido • 041 526 5721 (summer only) Padua Piazzale della Stazione • 049 875 2077 • www. turismopadova.it Vicenza Piazza Matteotti 12 • 044 432 0854 • www.vicenzae.org Verona Via degli Alpini 9 • 045 806 8680 • www. tourism.verona.it Getting Around Venice Directions Boat Fares City !


Player One by Douglas Coupland

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, call centre, double helix, Marshall McLuhan, neurotypical, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), uranium enrichment, Y2K

The only other sounds I can hear around me down inside Daffy Duck’s hole, other than nature sounds, are prayers and curses; they’re the only sounds with the power to cross over to wherever it is I am. Do prayers create electrical fields? Is that how they cross the universe? Who’s to say? I have no idea how cellphones connected me to call centres in Mumbai, but they still did it. Poor humanity, praying and cursing and praying and cursing. What is to become of us as a species? A part of me doesn’t worry about us. If we can breed wolves into wiener dogs in ten generations, what might we do with a billion years? Never mind what God might do with a billion years.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

While in the long run Portugal would gain, it would cause short-term misery for the generation of clothmakers who would struggle to retrain as vintners. The debate became live in the UK in the decade before the global financial crisis as the growing trend of ‘offshoring’ back-office jobs such as call centres and data entry personnel created fears that jobs were being lost to emerging markets such as India. Similarly in the United States, presidential candidate Ross Perot warned voters that signing up to the North American Free Trade Agreement would be marked by a ‘giant sucking sound’ of manufacturing jobs being lost to Mexico.


pages: 199 words: 63,844

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic by Rachel Clarke

Airbnb, Boris Johnson, call centre, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disruptive innovation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, social distancing, zero-sum game

They were ordered weeks ago by Steve, who had looked forward to surprising his wife on Valentine’s Day. Nearly a week after the onset of my symptoms, I am sufficiently concerned about the prospect of infecting my patients on my return to work – those in a hospice being exceptionally vulnerable – that I endeavour to be tested for Covid. The 111 call centre worker I speak to is clear, however: ‘You don’t meet the criteria for testing.’ ‘I know,’ I respond, fully aware that the only people eligible for tests currently are those who have been to Wuhan or Lombardy themselves and are also symptomatic. ‘But I’m a doctor working in a hospice. My patients couldn’t be frailer.


pages: 614 words: 176,458

Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie

agricultural Revolution, air gap, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, Food sovereignty, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Haber-Bosch Process, household responsibility system, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Just-in-time delivery, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, military-industrial complex, Northern Rock, Panamax, peak oil, precautionary principle, refrigerator car, rewilding, scientific mainstream, sexual politics, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Urban populations have swelled to previously unimaginable proportions as a result of India’s failure to control its population, which has doubled since Harris was writing in 1973, and its green revolution, which benefits commercial farmers able to afford fertilizers and tractors at the expense of small farmers. Meanwhile the foreign exchange pouring into the computer and call centre industries has led to the rise of an Americanized middle class whose allegiance to cow worship, even from those who remain nominally Hindu, is slim. ‘Junk food is fashionable. Eating meat is regarded as progressive. Modernization is equated with changing from being vegetarian to non-vegetarian, even while the rest of the world attempts to reverse this trend.’41 Abattoirs meeting modern standards of hygiene are constructed on the edge of the new conurbations.

A non-vegetarian Muslim Bangladeshi eats less meat per capita than a partly vegetarian Indian because Bangladeshis are poorer.57 In other words, members of India’s Hindu elite are rejecting its 2,000 year old dietary obligations, and choosing a western diet, just as they are choosing to wear western clothes, listen to western music, speak a western language, and adopt a western name when they work in the call centre. The worry is that the beef that was once reserved for India’s poor is being replaced by goat meat for its wealthy. Although Marvin Harris is observing from a western meat-eating perspective, and Maneka Gandhi, 25 years later, from an Indian vegetarian perspective, their views and conclusions are similar.


Croatia by Anja Mutic, Vesna Maric

call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, friendly fire, G4S, haute cuisine, low cost airline, off-the-grid, starchitect

Information There are several ATMs in town, and many money changers in the port area. Bol Tours ( 635 693; www.boltours.com; Vladimira Nazora 18) Books excursions, rents cars and finds private accommodation. Interactiv ( 091 57 25 855; Rudina 6; per hr 30KN; May-Oct) A dozen fast computers and a call centre. Most cafes have wi-fi and there are several hotspots around town (for a fee). More ( 642 050; www.more-bol.com; Vladimira Nazora 28) Private accommodation, scooter rental, island tours and excursions. Tourist Office ( 635 638; www.bol.hr; Porat Bolskih Pomoraca bb; 8.30am-10pm Jul & Aug, 8.30am-2pm & 4-9pm May, Jun & Sep) Inside a Gothic 15th-century townhouse; a good source of information on town events and distributes plenty of brochures.

Fontana Tours ( 742 133; www.happyhvar.com; Riva 18) Finds private accommodation, runs excursions, books boat taxis around the island and handles rentals. It has a romantic and isolated two-person apartment on Palmižana (600KN per night). Francesco (Burak bb; per hr 30KN; 8.30am-midnight) Internet cafe and call centre right behind the post office. Left luggage (35KN per day) and laundry service (50KN per load). Pelegrini Tours ( 742 743; www.pelegrini-hvar.hr; Riva bb) Private accommodation, boat tickets to Italy with Blue Line, excursions (its daily trips to the Pakleni Islands are popular) and bike, scooter and boat rental.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Accountants calibrate and audit the value of rentiers’ assets, rendering it legible, fungible and accessible to management and to the investment community. At the other end of the workforce spectrum, the 99 per cent perform the daily drudgery of sweating, or servicing, the assets that their bosses have heroically secured – manning call centres, fulfilling cleaning contracts, repairing network infrastructures, and so on. A striking example of this polarization is British American Tobacco, the London Stock Exchange–listed UK cigarette and tobacco manufacturer and intellectual property rentier whose market-leading brands include Dunhill, Lucky Strike and Rothmans (see Table 0.1).

The geography of private-sector outsourcing is an important consideration. Much of the discussion of outsourcing in the media, and indeed also by scholars, has focused on the contracting out of operations to lower-cost overseas territories.12 As Weber notes, prototypical cases include the moving of apparel-making jobs to China and call-centre operations to India.13 But while these are perhaps the best-known examples of corporations contracting out, and are clearly enormously important for all manner of reasons, cross-border outsourcing represents the exception rather than the norm, at least where its enactment by UK companies is concerned.


pages: 246 words: 71,594

Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond by Tom Cox

call centre, Google Earth, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Stephen Fry

I can’t think of any obvious reason my cats have decided to make their weekly Party Night coincide with that of the human population of East Mendleham. Each one of the furry schemers in my house has his or her clandestine double life, but I find it hard to believe that any of these would extend to a nine-to-five job working in a call centre, and its concomitant end-of-week stress-relief session. It’s not as if it gets to Friday afternoon and the six of them think, ‘You know what? I’m really pooped from five days of sleeping on the sofa, repeatedly cleaning my bottom and having my every whim catered for. What I really need to do is unwind.’


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

A government that wanted to improve public health would promote the employment of more conductors on buses and trains – not least in order to encourage people to use them instead of cars. It would promote more face-to-face interactions at post offices, rather than more impersonal, labour-saving and apparently efficient work through demoralising call centres. We would see more teachers, smaller class sizes in schools, and fewer executives paid millions of pounds a year. All this in the past created the dual benefits of increased and sustainable employment and increased social capital. In the words of John Kay, writing in the Financial Times, ‘policy to give the low-paid more money rather than benefits is worthy of debate and only a rabid ideologue could fail to appreciate that pay is not purely a question of productivity; it is also a question of bargaining.’78 Left in the control of the 1 per cent, the not-so-free market can destroy jobs and livelihoods faster than it creates them.


pages: 206 words: 69,645

Confessions of a GP by Benjamin Daniels

call centre, placebo effect

There were no anti-AIDS drugs (antiretrovirals, ARVs) and even our malaria medication supply was low because of a robbery at the hospital pharmacy (an inside job). Meanwhile, 30 miles outside of town, Rachel, a 22-year-old from Glasgow with no letters after her name, really was saving lives. Rachel had dropped out of her sociology degree and had been working in a call centre before deciding to come and do some voluntary work in Mozambique. She had raised some sponsorship from back home and was touring the rural villages with a troop of local women. All she had at her disposal was a basketful of free condoms and a few hundred subsidised mosquito nets. Accompanied by information and education in the form of songs and posters, her campaign was a raging success.


pages: 214 words: 69,986

No Shame: The Hilarious and Candid Memoir From One of Our Best-Loved Comedians by Tom Allen

call centre, period drama, spinning jenny

In arts centres built in the 1990s, they look like The Brittas Empire; if from the 1970s, they feel like the set of Crossroads. At the Palladium, it’s different because they make it nice for people like Joan Collins. They painted it all grey and for some reason put in lots of desks for chorus dancers to sit and do their make-up at. It’s very swish, but with all the desks, it can look a bit like a call centre. There are also lots more people than a lot of theatres because it’s such a huge venue and needs a lot of staff to make sure idiots like me don’t take a wrong turn and end up like the Phantom of the Opera suspended from the chandelier. Flo and I stood in the darkness of the huge wings at the side of the stage, ropes seemed to be going in different directions to hold up all the curtains – curtains much bigger than my mum’s tie-backs could ever hope to hold.


pages: 196 words: 68,365

Plot 29: A Memoir by Allan Jenkins

call centre, Joan Didion, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, three-masted sailing ship

Past our picnic spot, the murder of black crows, the shrieking parakeets, down by the reeded lakes where there may or may not be a heron. We turn by the tennis courts, the lido and running track. Last, back over the bridge and home. FEBRUARY 2. I am sitting at my desk, feeling disturbed. This is an open-plan newspaper office, with close seating like a call centre. I have been in a side room for a personal call to Barnardo’s ‘Making Connections’ team. I want to make my case for reducing the waiting time to see my records. Fourteen months seems a lifetime away. I am not 80, I don’t have a serious illness, so I need to know how they quantify abuse. Do I need proof and if so what kind?


pages: 217 words: 73,289

Tails I Lose: The Compulsive Gambler Who Lost His Shirt for Good by Justyn Rees

call centre, country house hotel, payday loans, Russell Brand, South China Sea

A quick glance at my watch told me there was no time left and, in any case, I would run the risk of waking Emma. I pulled at my collar and huddled closer to the wall as I dialled the number of my bank. A quick automated check of my balance told me my salary had just been deposited. Good. Then I entered the number sequence that would take me through to the bank’s call centre. It seemed to take forever. They probably didn’t get many calls at this time of night. “Good morning,” I said when I finally got through. “I’d like to make a transfer between my accounts, please.” I was paid by automated transfer on the same day of each month and the money always hit my account at 2 a.m.


pages: 232 words: 77,956

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, call centre, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, electricity market, Etonian, Ford Model T, gentrification, HESCO bastion, housing crisis, illegal immigration, land bank, Leo Hollis, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-industrial society, pre–internet, price mechanism, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor

Greg Thomson, Unison’s head of strategic organisation, told me that since it crossed the Channel, EDF had gone against prevailing management orthodoxy by reinstating a final salary pension scheme for workers. Unison was given seats with the CGT in an EDF/union body, a ‘European Works Council’, and enough leverage over EDF management to get union recognition for previously non-union workers at a call centre in Sunderland. ‘When London Electricity was privatised, we adopted a policy of returning it to public ownership, and I’m pleased to think I delivered on that,’ Thomson said. ‘Obviously to the wrong nation, but you can’t be too picky.’ Yet EDF’s foreign adventures make Unison’s French counterparts suspicious.


pages: 253 words: 79,214

The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, call centre, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", joint-stock company, junk bonds, labour market flexibility, large denomination, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

But it was also because British banks had moved to the originate and distribute model. When the credit crunch hit, some of those banks were particularly vulnerable. The Northern Rock Collapse Building up a base of retail deposits takes time and resources. Either you need a big base of branches (with lots of costly property and staff), a call centre to handle consumer enquiries or you need to offer a high return to attract the rate tarts who surf the internet. The originate and distribute model seemed to offer a quicker and easier route to gain market share. Instead of waiting for deposits to build up, a bank could go out and make the mortgage loans it desired and then sell those loans in the financial markets.


pages: 240 words: 74,182

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

‘The disinformation architect’, concludes Ong, ‘denies responsibility or commitment to the broader public by narrating a personal project of self-empowerment instead.’ Below the architects came the ‘influencers’, online comedians who, in between posting the latest jokes, made fun of opposing politicians for a fee. Down in the slums of the disinformation architecture were what Ong called the ‘community-level fake account operators’: call centres full of people working twenty-four-hour shifts, paid by the hour, with one person manning dozens of social media personas. They could be either someone who needed a little extra cash (students or nurses, for example) or campaign staff. Ong interviewed one operator, Rina, who had been forced into the work when she joined a mayoral campaign.


pages: 273 words: 76,786

Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett

airport security, Burning Man, call centre, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, failed state, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Jane Jacobs, Julian Assange, late capitalism, megacity, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, place-making, shareholder value, Stephen Fry, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, white flight, WikiLeaks

The organisation of urban explorer groups, again, mirrors that of computer hackers, which in turn, as journalists Arthur and Halliday wrote about the now-defunct hacker group Lulzsec, ‘mirror those of street gangs, where the talk is of respect, attacks, who can be trusted, who the enemies are (usually law enforcement and rival gangs), whose ground belongs to who, and who has accomplished what’.52 Explorers I met from the UK, United States, Sweden, France, Australia, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands include a number of people with various jobs – a social housing worker, a manager at Asda, a bus driver, a church leader, an exotic dancer, a cleaner, film and music students, an owner of a construction company, a few professional freelance photographers, a joiner, a banker, a call centre worker, a lighting engineer, a special constable, a dentist, a geography teacher and, unsurprisingly, a number of people working in software, IT and web design, who might also be considered hackers in the virtual sense. Obviously, in order to have the opportunity for these sorts of engagements with the city, one must be secure enough financially and have enough free time that investing the hours necessary to research and explore sites can be accomplished.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

Even recreation will be changed out of all recognition: sports clothing and equipment will improve dramatically; musical instruments will be 3-D printed at low cost and high quality; and virtual reality will transform the experience of playing computer games. These new technologies also enable a wide range of services to be automated – from care of the elderly16 to manning the telephones in call-centres.17 In Japan, there is already a hotel staffed almost entirely by robots.18 Perhaps even more importantly, new business models become possible. Smart cities, for example, which aim, in the words of the Smart Cities Council, to improve: 1. Liveability: Cities that provide clean, healthy living conditions without pollution and congestion.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

The promise of freedom, finally, rings equally hollow, with platforms’ busi- ness models making it difficult for workers to assert their fundamental rights, including the freedom to form a union and bargain collectively. Most operators are unsurprisingly hostile to any efforts at organizing genuinely independent worker representation. When unionization was on the cards in Seattle, Uber’s call-centre representatives were instructed to ring up drivers and ‘share some thoughts’ about how ‘collective bargaining and unioniza- tion do not fit the characteristics of how most partners use the Uber platform’.69 * * * 66 Lost in the Crowd As former New York Times correspondent Steven Greenhouse notes: In many ways, digital on-demand workers face far more obstacles to organiz- ing and being heard than workers in the traditional economy.


pages: 434 words: 77,974

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

Because the Maker system is smart contract–based, it does not require users to submit personal Know Your Customer (KYC) information to participate. The only thing required to interact with it is a private key and access to some ether. USDC An ERC-20 stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC) is supported by two of the largest and best-known companies in cryptocurrency: Coinbase and Circle. USDC is part of a larger consortium called Centre, whose members collaborate on the stablecoin’s governance and use cases. Grant Thorton, LLP, is the auditor for USDC. The firm provides monthly attestations that there are enough reserves to back the USDC stablecoin. The system requires users acquiring or redeeming USDC from the issuer to submit personal information for KYC checks.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Browse around the web and there are plenty of chatbots to play with, and tools to build your own. Eliza, the world’s first chatbot, appeared back in 1966. She didn’t do much; just commiserated with you – ‘I’m sorry to hear that’ – or repeated your statement as a question: ‘Why do you want to leave your husband?’ Eliza was limited but her bland meaninglessness seems to be the template for call centres the world over. How many times have you wondered if you are communicating with a bot and it turns out to be a human? Possibly we will need a Reverse Turing Test to pull humans up to the level of enabled empathetic bots. While most chatbots are narrow AI – an algorithm designed to do one thing only, like order the pizza or run through your ‘choices’ before being transferred to a human – some chatbots seem smarter.


pages: 705 words: 192,650

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail by Nick Wallis

Asperger Syndrome, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Dominic Cummings, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, lockdown, paper trading, social distancing, Wayback Machine, work culture

Richard’s specialism was ASCII (pronounced ‘Askey’, as in Arthur), a method of encoding alphabetical characters into binary which allowed him to insert instructions into the Horizon operating system. Subpostmasters would only reach third tier support when their Horizon issues had been deemed unsolvable by the second tier team. Second tier operators were based in various call centres around the country. They had reasonable technical knowledge, but they were some way from the third tier cadre in terms of ability and access. When it came to Horizon, third tier support were extremely capable, and to all intents and purposes, a law unto themselves. They had one mission – to keep the Horizon network going by any means necessary.

The final case study was a Subpostmaster called Jim Withers, who ran the Cromer Post Office in Norfolk. Tweedie described Withers raiding his savings and selling his car, shovelling money into Horizon to try to balance his discrepancies. Jim told the Mail, ‘I rang the helpline and they said, “Don’t worry, it will sort itself out”… One time, the woman at the call centre told us what to do, we did it and it doubled the loss! The woman said, “Don’t worry about it” again and put the phone down.’ Jim was ruined. He lost his home, his business and was living in rented accommodation. Tweedie spells it out. ‘The scandal surrounding Horizon quite likely represents one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice in the UK this century… Yet, the Post Office – one of the last bastions of nationalisation – has used millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to pursue people through the courts and silence criticism via an army of expensive lawyers, while continuing to deny to parliament that there was ever anything amiss.’


CultureShock! Egypt: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (4th Edition) by Susan L. Wilson

air freight, anti-communist, call centre, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land reform, RAND corporation, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route

MANAGING YOUR MONEY: BANKS For a listing of Egyptian banks, addresses and phone numbers go to: http://www.egyptdailynews.com/egypt%20banks.htm Some Egyptian banks have Internet sites, for example: „ Banque Misr Website: http://www.banquemisr.com.eg/index.asp „ Alwatany Bank of Egypt Website: http://www.alwatany.net/ „ Banque du Caire Website: http://www.bdc.com.eg/English/ Emergency Numbers (Cairo) „ „ „ American Express (24 hour customer service) Tel: (02) 2480-1530 Visa Card (Lost Cards) Tel: (toll free in Cairo) 510-0200-866-654-0128 (outside Cairo) 02-510-0200-866-654-0128 Western Union Money Transfer Tel: (02) 2755-5165 (Heliopolis); (02) 2796-2151 (Garden City) Website: http://www.westernunion.com/ (Click “Find A Location”) Resource Guide 311 TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS Train information/reservations Tel: (02) 2575-3555 Country and City Codes The country code for Egypt is 20 Selected City Codes Cairo Alexandria Aswan Luxor Hurghada 2 3 97 95 65 Telephone Service „ „ „ Mobinil (Their mobile numbers always start with ‘012’) Nile City Bldg. 2005C, Cornishe El-Nil, Ramlet-Boulaq Customer Service: 16110 (from any line); 110 (from a Mobinil line) Website: http://www.mobinil.com/home.aspx Vodafone Egypt (formerly Click GSM. Their mobile numbers always start with ‘010’) Vodafone C2 Bldg., Cairo Telemarketing: (02) 2529-4444 (Sun to Thurs 9am to 5pm) Customer Service: 16888 (from any line) Telecom Egypt (Landline service) Call centre: 111 (24 hours daily) Important Telephone Numbers „ International Operator 120 For Telephone Complaints „ HQ (Troubleshooting) 188 312 CultureShock! Egypt INTERNET CAFÉS AND SERVICE PROVIDERS „ „ „ „ Internet Egypt 2 Midan Simon Bolivar, Ground Floor, Garden City, Cairo Tel: 19665; fax: (02) 2794-9611 Email: inquiries@internetegypt.com Website: http://www.internetegypt.com/Contact_us.htm At Internet Egypt, you can get free through DSL service (at a reasonable rate) and it has four cybercafés throughout Cairo.


pages: 274 words: 85,557

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You by Misha Glenny

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, BRICs, call centre, Chelsea Manning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, James Watt: steam engine, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pirate software, Potemkin village, power law, reserve currency, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Stuxnet, urban sprawl, white flight, WikiLeaks, zero day

He followed the scareware back to its source in East Asia and found that the administrator of IM’s servers had left some ports wide open, so Kolberg was at liberty to wander into the server and peruse it at will. What he uncovered was quite breathtaking. Innovative Marketing was making so much money that it had established three call centres – one for English speakers, one for German and one for French – to assist baffled customers who were trying to install their non-functioning products. Kolberg worked out from trawling through the receipts he also found on the server that the scareware scam had generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the management, in one of the most theatrical examples of Internet crime.


Culture Shock! Costa Rica 30th Anniversary Edition by Claire Wallerstein

anti-communist, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, card file, Day of the Dead, Easter island, fixed income, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, out of africa, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban sprawl

The Costa Rican economy is changing rapidly, with agriculture being downgraded and clothing factories declining in the face of cheaper competition from Asia. The country is now trying to re-model itself as a suitable location for high technology industries, foreign In 1988, Intel opened a huge companies’ operation centres for microprocessor plant in the human resources, call centres, country (the country’s GDP figures are now given both conferences and conventions. ‘with’ and ‘without’ Intel), while As an investor, it’s important Procter and Gamble has set up to think extremely carefully about its services and payroll division here to cover all its operations the sort of business you want to from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. set up, especially if your scope Lucent Technologies, Panasonic, is small.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Just as we insist that learner drivers are accompanied by an experienced driver, companies are working to create similar backup advisors for driverless cars. In the event that a driverless car encounters a situation it cannot safely navigate, it will be able to call on the services of a remote contact centre for support. The operator in the call centre can temporarily access all the car’s sensor data and make a decision about how best to proceed. New instructions can then be sent to the car - and the driverless car’s software can learn from its experience, and then share that experience with all other driverless cars. For example, if the car was confused by an unmapped construction zone temporarily requiring cars to “illegally” cross solid lines to navigate an obstacle, the remote operator could “reassure” the driverless car that it was ok to do so.


pages: 259 words: 85,514

The Knife's Edge by Stephen Westaby

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, dark triade / dark tetrad, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, presumed consent, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

The same ridiculous process began once again, with the same inane questions. I made it clear that I did not want an ambulance to bring my mother to hospital. The conversation was going nowhere. Our situation was deteriorating and I sensed that there was no help to be had. ‘I will get our medical officer [the one sitting in the call centre directing traffic] to call you on this number,’ the frustrated woman eventually told me. After further delay the doctor called, and I left him in no doubt about the nature of the situation and what I believed should happen. Even he took some persuading, but he agreed to send the single GP covering the whole region.


pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

For example, as of 2017, Google counted a total of 61,814 employees worldwide, far smaller than the number of General Motors employees, which stood at 180,000 as of December 2017, down from 600,000 in 1979, despite being a fraction of Google in terms of annual turnover. The bulk of new jobs that have been created by the digital revolution and its transformation of the world of work tend instead to be lowly qualified and lowly paid jobs. This trend is epitomised by the rapid growth of causalised workers such as call centre workers, riders for delivery companies such as Deliveroo, Uber drivers or warehouse workers as those of Amazon104 among many other typical profiles of the so-called ‘gig economy’.105 These figures can be considered as part of the ‘precariat’, an emerging class which, in his General Theory of the Precariat, Italian activist and theorist Alex Foti describes as ‘the underpaid, underemployed, underprotected, overeducated, and overexploited’.106 What is more, many fear the job-destroying avalanche of the incoming second automation revolution, with robots predicted to eliminate many manual jobs such as drivers substituted by self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence threatening to destroy clerical jobs, such as those in the legal and accounting sectors.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

Home owners become trapped by negative equity, and struggle to move to the booming cities where homes are much more expensive. The fall in the price of commercial property indeed attracts some activities, but they are the stuff that forms the underbelly of the national economy: warehouses that serve the local region; low-productivity manufacturers that can only survive if their premises are very cheap; call centres that rely upon cheap premises and low-waged, casual labour. As the city fills up with such activities, property prices and wages partially recover, but the city has stumbled into a cul-de-sac. These activities are low skilled, and so the workforce is no longer participating in the ever-rising productivity of complex specialization.1 The superstar firms in the metropolis remain at the technology frontier and so the metropolitan population benefits from rising incomes, but neither the technology nor the incomes trickle down to the broken cities.


pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Google is the most striking example of a company that has taken elements of We-Think-style work into the corporate world and created an extremely potent mutant: a money-making machine that espouses open-source values. Of course it is ridiculous to imagine that most work could be like this in future. Call centres and retail outlets will be experience and service factories: highly regimented, delivering a high-quality, low-cost service. Trading floors in banks are financial-services factories. Even young scientists complain that lab work is highly repetitive and boring. Yet large organisations will increasingly feel the gravitational pull of open and participative ways of working.


pages: 212 words: 80,393

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie

British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, delayed gratification, falling living standards, financial exclusion, full employment, income inequality, low skilled workers, meritocracy, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, unpaid internship, urban renewal, working poor

The men talked about the hopelessness of ever getting a job that offered economic stability and respect among their friends and family; they knew that getting a low-skilled, low-paid job would not give them a valued identity they needed to live on this estate, or even the means to live as ‘a proper family’, which was usually more of an aspiration for the future than a reality in the present. When I spoke to Dread about working and getting a job, his reaction was typical of many of the men on the estate: “There’s no jobs here for anyone, what can I do now, I used to work for the council as a gardener, I liked that but that’s gone now, I’m not doing no gay job in a call centre.” Robert MacDonald et al (2005) have used the term ‘displaced masculinities’ to describe the disengagement and difficulties young working-class men encounter in the transition from youth to adulthood, with the absence of ‘masculine employment’ offering status and respect. In this neighbourhood, status and respect are important resources, and to look for employment that may diminish local respect and status carries far too much risk and too much loss.


pages: 291 words: 90,771

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It. by James Silver

Airbnb, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, call centre, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, DevOps, family office, flag carrier, fulfillment center, future of work, Google Hangouts, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, pattern recognition, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

On the consumer side it was literally phone calls to our “customer care” line that used to come through to my personal mobile in the early years because we didn’t have any customer care, and it was things like “My food’s late” or “They forgot my popadoms” or “I thought it came with fries”. So we’d then have to call the restaurants ourselves to sort it out. ‘It was painful and difficult in those early years as a bootstrapped business, and as soon as we had the capital we started employing a call centre, thank the Lord. But operations for us, particularly in the early days, was gritty at a very local level, dealing with real issues from real customers in real time, and the same for restaurant owners. We used to have restaurants’ money, because obviously often it’d be paid by credit card over the web.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

It is not the same as ‘the centre’. But aggressive, fascistic groups aren’t a peculiarity entirely disconnected from the normal state of affairs and they don’t just begin to be a threat when they do well electorally.65 Moreover, it’s not just the far right that produces anti-immigration politics. People in the so-called centre believe that if they take on some of the far right’s arguments, they can control them and make them reasonable. They embrace cheap, jingoistic or unthinking nationalism, which already decorates tabloid front pages, with the claim it will somehow help to address social anxieties. By assuming that they don’t reproduce racist politics – by believing that it is only the far right who do this – they would rather issue condemnations than reflect on how their own politics might reinforce or contain within it xenophobic and racist attitudes.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Economics increasingly resembles a zero-sum game, in which more for one group means less for another. And those with the political power are using it to monopolise the shrinking gains from growth for themselves. As long as the foundations of our finance-led growth model remain the same, then these contradictions will continue to escalate. In this febrile political climate, the so-called centre — committed to propping up the status quo — cannot hold. When the liberal establishment decries the rise of “populism”, they are demonstrating once again that they lack any understanding of the current political moment. The disdain directed at those who attempt to create political change outside of the “civilised” institutions of liberal democracy involves a total failure to understand that those institutions no longer work — something that is quite easy to forget when you are situated comfortably inside them.


pages: 278 words: 82,771

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money by Owen Walker

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brexit referendum, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, fixed income, G4S, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, liquidity trap, lockdown, mass affluent, popular capitalism, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Winter of Discontent

Born in Pembury, Kent, the son of a bricklayer, he grew up just outside Tonbridge, attending the local secondary school and playing for East Peckham & Paddock Wood rugby club into his twenties. Newman began his career straight after leaving school, starting out at Cornhill Insurance before working in local branches of Bank of Ireland. In his mid-twenties, he joined Invesco’s London-based sales department, and was soon running its customer services team, overseeing the call centre and complaints-handling staff. In order to improve his communication skills when dealing with clients, Newman hired a linguistics coach, who became a mentor to him over the years. Newman’s big break came in 2000, when Invesco merged with Perpetual and he landed the job as head of retail sales.


pages: 280 words: 82,393

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

Atul Gawande, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, data science, different worldview, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture , zero-sum game

In long-established organisations, staff may be able to make their intentions known to each other in a way that leaves newcomers mystified, whereas in a start-up, anything that isn’t explicitly articulated will not be heard. Individuals shift between high- and low-context modes: with family or friends, you probably do a lot of high-context communication, but when talking to someone in a call centre, you go low-context. Low-context cultures are better suited to societies undergoing change, with high levels of diversity and innovation. But they can also feel impersonal, brittle and unpredictable, and contain greater potential for strife. Most of us, wherever we are in the world, are living increasingly low-context lives, as more and more of us flock to cities, do business with strangers and converse over smartphones.


pages: 295 words: 84,843

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

The software optimised the timing and logged the effects. Employees who were up and active on social media early in the morning got the notification first thing, night owls got it later in the day. All to make campaigns look as authentic as possible. Carlos: ‘A company like Telefonica has fifteen hundred people working in its call centre alone. If a third do it, that’s more than enough people to get a topic trending at any given moment.’ The two Spaniards noticed this strategy was most effective on Twitter. It was less group-oriented than Facebook, which worked better with their campaigns. ‘Twitter feeds off controversy,’ explains Julio.


pages: 279 words: 85,552

Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen by Peter Apps

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, COVID-19, forensic accounting, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, the built environment, University of East Anglia, value engineering

Some residents had mould and mushrooms growing in kitchens due to persistent leaks and poor ventilation.6 For residents, trying to complain – or even report repairs – was a thankless task. In the early 2010s, an office on the estate where residents had previously reported problems was closed and replaced with a call centre. Residents describe being addressed in an ‘abrupt and rude’ manner when they reported complaints and felt the organisation was ‘incapable of getting bookings finalised or contractors to arrive on the right day if at all’. Those who complained were forced to go through a three-stage process which rumbled on for months.


pages: 297 words: 89,206

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

The percentage of people who know a chief executive also increases steadily across the income spectrum, starting at about 20 per cent for those earning the least, and rising to over 80 per cent of those earning the most: high-income people know chief executives at four times the rate of low-income GBCS respondents. The percentages of people who say they know a sales/shop assistant or factory worker, conversely, decline across the income spectrum: the richest people are as unlikely to know a factory worker (or a catering assistant or call-centre worker or people in a few other positions not mentioned above) as the poorest are to know an aristocrat, despite the fact that there are far more low-income workers than aristocrats in the UK. What we are seeing here is a kind of ‘outlier’ effect. Rather than the key differences lying in the middle of the social structure, between middle and working class, the most arresting differences are at the extremes.


Fearsome Particles by Trevor Cole

call centre, clean water, Khartoum Gordon, late fees, microplastics / micro fibres, MITM: man-in-the-middle

We have to figure out, vis-à-vis our regular window screens, do we charge more for a window filter because it filters out stuff, or do we charge less because it won’t let you see outside?” Across from him, Sandy emitted a long, loud sigh. “Well, you know, hey, it’s an issue. So, okay …” He drew his pen down the list on his pad. “… acceptance … pricing … Next one, customer service. I think we should plan on establishing a toll-free customer service number, and staffing up with call-centre people, to take the calls from customers who’ve had the filters installed and want to know how the hell they’re supposed to see outside.” Sandy had begun to agitate in her swivelling chair like the vanes of a washing machine. “Thank you, Mr. Negativity!” “Once we solve those issues” – Trick made his face and voice sunshine bright – “I think we got a winner!”


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

For example, Yatango Mobile, an Australian telecoms company, offers phone credit to customers who provide technical support. Launched in February 2013 as a “social telco”, the company is only open to Facebook users and offers up to $5 phone credit for customers who recruit friends on the social network. Furthermore, it has no call centres; all technical support is handed over to members in exchange for call credit. Yatango customers earn 10 cents in phone credit for every technical support question they answer on Yotango’s online self-service forum. CASE STUDY 5 giffgaff: the mobile network run by you In 2008, Gav Thompson, head of brand strategy at O2, a UK mobile telecoms provider, attended a conference on social media in San Francisco.


I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan by Steve Coogan

call centre, Celtic Tiger, citation needed, cuban missile crisis, late fees, means of production, negative equity, University of East Anglia, young professional

And I opened all subsequent shows with the same shout. And you know what, it became something of a calling card, voted years later 84th in Channel 4’s 100 Best Catchphrases. And if people to this day shout it out at me, in the street, or when I’m trying to pay for my shopping, or if I ring up a call centre to renew car insurance, or in a doctor’s waiting room if I’m having trouble digesting food, it doesn’t bother me. I’m fine with it. I like it. It makes me feel good and glad. Why wouldn’t it? So if people think it does bother me or that they’re getting one over on me, or that it might be a good way of riling me, they could literally not be further from the truth.


pages: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

The important fact for our purposes is that there is a whole separate network within the main Highway System, the Eisenhower Interstate System–the equivalent of our motorway network but more, so much more. The Eisenhower Interstate System You might blanch at the prospect of me enlarging any further on this subject, but–as they say in call centres–bear with me, it really is jolly interesting. It concerns, after all, the greatest public-works project in the history of our species. In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his administration released the budget and set in motion the creation of an enormous network of major roads, connecting all the great metropolitan areas of America.


pages: 317 words: 98,745

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

As the London Review of Books reported: Of the 50 million subscribers ThorpeGlen processed, 48 million effectively belonged to ‘one large group’: they called one another, or their friends called friends of their friends; this set of people was dismissed. A further 400,000 subscriptions could be attributed to a few large ‘nodes’, with numbers belonging to call centres, shops and information services. The remaining groups ranged in size from two to 142 subscribers. Members of these groups only ever called each other – clear evidence of antisocial behaviour – and, in one extreme case, a group was identified in which all the subscribers only ever called a single number at the centre of the web.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

THE POLITICAL CHALLENGE OF PROSPERITY This should be a good problem for mankind to have. An abundance of labour is arguably the point, to the extent that there is one, of technological progress. It is the beginning of the end of the need to work hard to stay alive. A system in which people actively seek out labour they would strongly prefer not to do – manning call centres to handle the complaints of unhappy customers, or carrying packages around a boiling warehouse, for example – is not one society ought to aim to preserve any longer than technologically necessary. If society can find ways to automate such unpleasant tasks, or to share the work more broadly so that individual workers devote fewer of their waking hours to hard, unpleasant labour, that surely represents human progress.


pages: 382 words: 92,138

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

While predictions (and often rumours) about the future of Apple and its products tend to dominate the public (media) discussions on the company, during one of these media frenzies, journalist David Segal, in his New York Times article of 23 June 2012, discussed the company’s great expansion in the retail segment of its business and the prospect of those new jobs. Apple’s demand in the labour market has shown a greater increase in the retail and other services segments of its business as Apple set up more stores, data and call centres around the country. Even with online retailers such as Amazon threatening to disrupt the retail industry, forcing companies to close stores or to focus on online sales, Apple has been eager to increase its stores and focus on complete consumer satisfaction via person-to-person sales in order to boost sales.


pages: 467 words: 92,081

Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephen Westaby

call centre, lateral thinking, stem cell

I was tired and irritable so I let rip. Who on earth were they to question our efforts to save a twenty-year-old? So bloody what if we weren’t a transplant centre. She didn’t need a transplant. Her own heart just needed a rest from the battering it had received over the last twenty-four hours. Why was this so-called ‘centre of excellence’ unable to save a kid who’d collapsed within a mile of the hospital? It certainly wasn’t through lack of effort by the medical staff. Just as I was about to lose it altogether I heard that the equipment had arrived. Our patient was already on her way round to theatre, so I went to meet the company representative who’d made an enormous effort to come and help us.


pages: 309 words: 96,434

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

Changing trends in behaviour across the social and economic spectrum are also witnessing changes, with a report from the Mental Health Foundation finding that 64 per cent believe people are getting angrier, as the idea of ‘rage’ is linked to more everyday occurrences.76 Shopping rage, trolley rage, call-centre rage, PC rage, pavement rage and, of course, road rage all reflect a mix of increasing individualism and a growing sense of entitlement and frustration in a busy world where time is at a premium, bringing with it a reduced tolerance when things go wrong. When it comes to young people, their sense of entitlement and sensitivity to status and issues of ‘respect’ create a combustible mix.


pages: 287 words: 92,194

Sex Power Money by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, fake news, Firefox, gender pay gap, invention of movable type, Louis Daguerre, meta-analysis, Neil Kinnock, Ocado, phenotype, Russell Brand, TED Talk, telemarketer, twin studies, zero-sum game

When I first heard about the SWOP stall, I absolutely understood why they were there: so that students selling sex to support themselves would know of a qualified resource that could help them. And just as importantly, as a symbol of acceptance, that what they’re doing is not shameful or wrong, that it is a profession alongside working in a call centre or a shop. But I guess why people worry is because if you take the stigma away, if you say, ‘Selling sex is a job just like hairdressing,’ then more people might be encouraged to do it. Is that why we are not averse to whorephobia? Do we think it’s doing a useful job, keeping too many people from selling their bodies to make ends meet?


pages: 279 words: 90,888

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

People were left to represent themselves in cases of debt, unfair dismissal, clinical negligence, immigration and schooling. Among the victims were parents left to struggle alone in the family courts. Coram, the children’s charity, was grant-aided to offer parents advice – but only in the form of a single telephone conversation, not face-to-face and certainly not in court. We listened in at its Colchester call centre. Staff were under intense pressure, the phones ringing non-stop. A thousand calls a day went unanswered. One mother was panicking. The court had given her Iranian ex-husband visiting rights, and she feared he would steal their children because he had possession of their passports. Here was an emergency where previously legal aid would have paid for a solicitor to take urgent action; now, she risked losing her children for ever.


pages: 282 words: 89,266

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 by Stewart Lee

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, call centre, centre right, David Attenborough, Etonian, gentrification, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Livingstone, I presume, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, pre–internet, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Fry, trickle-down economics, wage slave, young professional

She must be brilliant, as bringing standards to banking is a tough job. Apparently, there’s a Conservative MPs’ Scruples Committee as well. Darren Henley is a former managing director of Classic FM, which is like Radio 3 with all the problematic programmes filleted out, the perfect playlist to keep people calm while they wait on hold for hours for someone in a call centre to answer their phone. “Just one Cornetto! Give it to me! Delicious ice cream. From Italy.” Andrew Fisher is the executive chairman of Shazam, a smartphone app which identifies unknown songs, and with which he has made the world a much duller place, bereft of mystery; crushing the richness of human experience for economic gain, giving you what you want, right here, right now.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Then there are the payment infrastructures such as Visa, Mastercard, the clearing houses, and Swift, the international transfer giant (though it is still bank-owned). Banks also increasingly outsource their payment services to third-party providers; most have already hived off their card acquiring and processing activities, and many are now doing the same for issuing cards. It’s the same story for customer service, including call centres. The banks have to pay for all this and invest in their own IT and in shared infrastructures, reducing the amount they actually pocket from payments. Sluggish growth and low interest rates do not generally make for happy banks. Combine that with the aforementioned fees and investments, heavy regulation, excess capacity, unionised workforces and tough employment laws, and a bank can find itself in a bind.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

Catering businesses (canteens, restaurants, coffee shops, etc.) were now employing more than food and drink retailers, each more than 1 million.12 The United Kingdom had become a land of servers, waiters and cooks, not of shopkeepers but of shop-workers. Then there were the service industries as they are more usually thought of – the retail banks, the estate agencies, the call centres. By 2000 armies of proletarianized office workers and call-centre operatives were making a mockery of the earlier notion that white-collar work was superior in status to a manual manufacturing job. Finally, there were the public sector and publicly financed service jobs. They were far more important than a politically driven picture of the recent past would suggest.


pages: 315 words: 99,065

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

One of the earlier adopters of work at home was the US airline jetBlue which, when it started service in 2000, set up all of its telephone reservations agents as home-based employees in the Salt Lake City Utah region. At the time I remember founder David Neeleman proudly telling me that this initiative created several hundred new job openings for stay-at-home mothers who would be unable to work from a call centre but could do a great job while the kids were at school or the baby was sleeping. Apparently the turnover with this group has been negligible. I know a lot of ‘I’d go crazy if I had to stay around the house all week’ types who find the very idea of working from home to be quite abhorrent. In my own case I have always found working from home – as I have done all my life – reduces the stress levels I know I’d suffer if I were working from an office and bringing work home in the evenings and weekends.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

The demand for low-skilled, and mainly low paid, jobs has in fact been increasing in recent decades, stimulated by a host of factors: Britain’s flexible labour market, privatisation, the contracting out of so many jobs by big companies, the disappearance of a high wage floor in some sectors once sustained by unions and wages councils, the introduction of a more comprehensive tax credit income supplement system in 1999, the high demand for part-time work from working mothers, and, since 2004, the inflow of large numbers of eastern Europeans with a generally high work ethic and low wage expectations. Estimates of the number of low-skill jobs, depending on the definition of low skill, range from 8 million to 13 million (25 per cent to 40 per cent of all jobs)—including, among others, retail, cleaning, hospitality, care, driving/delivery jobs, assembly line work and routine clerical and call centre work. (Some of these will be subject to automation and the onward march of the robots, even in areas like social care, but many of them will not be. And someone still has to clean the robots.) This miscalculation was part of a bigger story of the casual way in which Britain, the first industrial nation, drifted into becoming a post-industrial one.


pages: 292 words: 97,911

Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies by Nick Frost

Alexander Shulgin, call centre, David Attenborough, hive mind, impulse control, job-hopping, Norman Mailer, Rubik’s Cube, tech billionaire

A cabbie maybe? I liked driving but couldn’t afford a car, I didn’t have a pot to piss in. What could I do? Me and Dion thought about starting a garden-clearing business called Busy Bees. It never came to fruition. I needed to do something so I took the first job that I saw. I spent a week working in a call centre off Great Portland Street. Telesales. It was not for me at all. It was full of Wolf of Wall Street wannabees. Guys with headsets on selling, selling, selling. At points they’d stop yabbering to use the telesales professional’s greatest tool . . . Silence. Let the other fucker speak first. Take away every opportunity the guy on the other end of the phone has to say no until the only thing he can say is, yes.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

There are certainly some services that have high productivity and considerable scope for further productivity growth – banking and other financial services, management consulting, technical consulting and IT support come to mind. But most other services have low productivity and, more importantly, have little scope for productivity growth due to their very nature (how much more ‘efficient’ can a hairdresser, a nurse or a call centre telephonist become without diluting the quality of their services?). Moreover, the most important sources of demand for those high-productivity services are manufacturing firms. So, without a strong manufacturing sector, it is impossible to develop high-productivity services. This is why no country has become rich solely on the basis of its service sector.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

There are certainly some services that have high productivity and considerable scope for further productivity growth – banking and other financial services, management consulting, technical consulting and IT support come to mind. But most other services have low productivity and, more importantly, have little scope for productivity growth due to their very nature (how much more ‘efficient’ can a hairdresser, a nurse or a call centre telephonist become without diluting the quality of their services?). Moreover, the most important sources of demand for those high-productivity services are manufacturing firms. So, without a strong manufacturing sector, it is impossible to develop high-productivity services. This is why no country has become rich solely on the basis of its service sector.


pages: 321 words: 97,661

How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine by Trisha Greenhalgh

call centre, complexity theory, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, p-value, personalized medicine, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, systematic bias, systems thinking, the scientific method

MacLure [30] has written an excellent philosophical article claiming that with its overemphasis on protocols and procedures, a conventional systematic review degrades the status of interpretive scholarly activities such as reading, writing and talking, and replaces them with a series of auditable technical tasks. This change, she claims, is partly driven by the new managerialism in research and results in ‘the call-centre version of research synthesis’. I once wrote a short commentary called Why are Cochrane Reviews so boring?, arguing that an overly technocratic approach to data extraction and synthesis strips the meaning from a review [20]. But whilst this may be true and MacLure may have a point, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.


pages: 241 words: 90,538

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945 by Pat Thane

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gender pay gap, longitudinal study, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, old-boy network, pensions crisis, Russell Brand, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Work — 1945 to 1970s: full employment (for men); high but falling levels of industrial employment; increasing female employment, a large proportion of it part-time — mid-1970s to present: decline of heavy industry; increased service employment, on a spectrum ranging from low-paid (such as fast-food and call-centre industries) to high-paid work (such as financial services) — early 1980s to mid-1990s: high unemployment, particularly among men, older workers and some minority ethnic groups — 1980s to present: increased hours of work and of reported stress at work, but not the extreme shift away from the ‘job for life’ towards short-term contracts often assumed, except in a few sectors;1 steadily expanding range of employment open to women (although much of it still part-time) and members of some minority ethnic groups, but still with inadequate pay, promotion and training opportunities; unemployment rising again in 2008–9.


pages: 372 words: 98,659

The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, car-free, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, coronavirus, COVID-19, driverless car, experimental subject, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, Sidewalk Labs, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, twin studies, Wall-E, washing machines reduced drudgery

This is a common observation – that encouraging people to get up more in an office doesn’t just make them healthier, it also improves communication around the office. One of the key principles of the BeUpstanding project is that staff get to decide what methods work best for them. One of Healy’s favourite examples came in a call centre where she helped implement a programme to reduce sitting time. It was, she recalls, ‘a very high-stress environment’ where abusive calls were relatively regular. ‘One of the strategies that their team chose was that if someone got an abusive call, they would stand up and shake it off,’ Healy says.


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

While I think the most pessimistic predictions in the report are unlikely to be realized in the medium term, I firmly believe that AI and the associated technologies of advanced automation and robotics will make many people redundant in the near future. If your job involves looking at data on a form and then making a decision (such as whether to give a loan or not), then I’m afraid to say AI is likely to make you redundant. If your job involves talking a customer through a well-defined script (as is the case in many call-centre jobs), then I’m sorry that AI will probably make you redundant. If your job involves nothing more than routine driving in a constrained, well-mapped urban area, then it’s probable AI will make you redundant. Just don’t ask me when. For most of us, however, the main effect of the new technology will be on the nature of work that we all do.


pages: 318 words: 99,524

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis by Kevin Rodgers

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, diversification, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, latency arbitrage, law of one price, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Minsky moment, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, Y2K, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

After another few formal presentations and a hurried lunch, we split into groups of 15 or so to discuss various questions that Hal had set us. The group I was in was sent to a plushly furnished meeting room to consider ‘how to expand the reach of sales’. Various ideas were thrown around. One very loud French salesman lobbied for the idea of a call centre in a cheap location where smaller clients could be directed. Another, from our Singapore office, suggested hiring a lot of salespeople in Singapore and have them cover the rest of the Asian region by means of frequent flights: ‘It’s got to be cheaper than opening up offices, right?’ Maybe, I thought, but the cost of replacing the jet-dazed salespeople’s burned-out husks every two years might not run cheap.


Spain by Lonely Planet Publications, Damien Simonis

Atahualpa, business process, call centre, centre right, Colonization of Mars, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, intermodal, Islamic Golden Age, land reform, large denomination, low cost airline, megaproject, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The streets of Spain’s cities have taken on new hues. Madrid in the 1980s had a largely uniform feel but today it hums to the sounds of many languages, whose speakers have brought new tastes to the dining table. Kebab stands and Peruvian restaurants abound. You’ll find, for example, Argentines staffing call centres, Filipinos waiting in restaurants or Eastern Europeans working in bars. Hordes of retired and wealthy EU citizens are catered for by co-nationals on the holiday coasts. The image of illegal immigrants crossing the Straits of Gibraltar, and the more dangerous Atlantic route (to the Canary Islands) from Mauritania and even Senegal, in barely seaworthy boats has been a daily reminder of a litany of suffering.

POST Main post office (944 22 05 48; Alameda de Urquijo 19) TOURIST INFORMATION Tourist office (944 79 57 60; www.bilbao.net/bilbaoturismo) Main Office (Plaza del Ensanche 11; 9am-2pm & 4-7.30pm Mon-Fri); Airport (944 71 03 01; 7.30am-11pm Mon-Fri, 8.30am-11pm Sat & Sun); Guggenheim (Avenida Abandoibarra 2; 10am-7pm Mon-Sat, 10am-6pm Sun Jul-Sep, 11am-6pm Tue-Fri, 11am-7pm Sat, 11am-3pm Sun Oct-May); Teatro Arriaga (Plaza Arriaga; 9.30am-2pm & 4-7.30pm daily Jun-Sep, 11am-2pm & 5-7.30pm Mon-Fri, 9.30am-2pm & 5-7.30pm Sat, 9.30am-2pm Sun Oct-May) Bilbao’s friendly tourist-office staffers are extremely helpful, well informed and above all enthusiastic about their city. At all offices ask for the free bimonthly Bilbao Guía, with its entertainment listings plus tips on restaurants, bars and nightlife. There is also a call centre (944 71 03 01; 8.30am-11pm), which is on duty everyday and is equally helpful. Sights MUSEO GUGGENHEIM Opened in September 1997, Bilbao’s Museo Guggenheim (944 35 90 80; www.guggenheim-bilbao.es; Avenida Abandoibarra 2; adult/under 12yr/student €12.50/free/7.50; 10am-8pm daily Jul & Aug, 10am-8pm Tue-Sun Sep-Jun) lifted modern architecture and Bilbao into the 21st century – with sensation.

The second-largest and northernmost of the Balearics, Menorca also has a wetter climate and is usually a few degrees cooler than the other islands. Particularly in the low season, the ‘windy island’ is relentlessly buffeted by tramuntana winds from the north. Check out the tourist information website www.e-menorca.org and the island’s official accommodation website, www.visitmenorca.com. Within Spain, you can also try the call centre (902 92 90 15; 10am-6pm). For activities, have a look at Menorca Activa (www.menorcaactiva.com). Orientation The capital, Maó (Castilian: Mahón), is at the eastern end of the island. Ferries from the mainland and Palma de Mallorca arrive at Maó’s busy port, and Menorca’s airport is 7km southwest of the city.


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

Most outdoor activities are concentrated in the few backpacker-friendly destinations, namely Mérida, Caripe, Ciudad Bolívar and Santa Elena de Uairén. Communications Venezuela is relatively technologically savvy, and call centres and internet cafés are found in all major towns; except in the most remote outposts, you should have no trouble finding a reasonable internet connection. Movistar and CANTV (and its cellphone subsidiary Movilnet) are the most visible telecommunications providers. All have call centres and outlets in most towns and cities. Pre-paid SIM cards can be topped up by street vendors or in your provider’s store. Calls are inexpensive, and data plans are available on every network, including texts, local and international calls.

The three major mobile phone networks are Movistar, Claro and Tigo, and it’s inexpensive to purchase a local mobile phone: a basic handset will set you back around C$50,000–60,000; if you have an unlocked phone, a SIM card will set your back around C$12,000 with around C$5000 worth of credit, and top-up credits sold in every corner shop. However, it’s cheapest to make domestic long-distance calls using the mobile phones in corner stores that buy minutes in bulk (look for the word “minutos”). Call centres (telecentros) allow you to make inexpensive calls both to local numbers and abroad, though Skype and WhatsApp are the cheapest way to go, given the proliferation of free wi-fi. For postal services, packages are best sent via private companies such as Avianca (aviancaexpress.com) and Deprisa (deprisa.com).

Travellers’ cheques are serious hassle to use. Opening hours and holidays Most shops and public offices are open Monday to Saturday 9am to 5pm or 6pm, but family-owned businesses open at the owner’s discretion. Most banks are open 8 or 9am to 4pm Monday to Friday and until noon weekends in shopping malls. Call centres open 8am to 10pm. Restaurant and bar opening hours vary and museums are usually open weekends and closed Mondays. On weekends and public holidays government offices and some shops are closed. The majority of national holidays mark famous historical events as well as Catholic festivals. Ecuadorians love to party with lots of food, drink and late nights, so it’s a great experience.


pages: 350 words: 110,764

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives. London: Harper Collins. Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Callaghan, George, and Paul Thompson. 2002. “ ‘We Recruit Attitude’: The Selection and Shaping of Routine Call Centre Labour.” Journal of Management Studies 39 (2): 233–54. Campaign for Wages for Housework. 2000. “Wages for Housework.” In Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, 258. New York: Basic. Carver, Terrell. 1998. The Postmodern Marx.


pages: 471 words: 109,267

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

Though it sank in the recession he was doing well enough to push the joint Hatt household income above the median. He worked with his father and his 24-year-old son Christopher in a business founded in 1954, three generations of Hatts working together. Christopher still lived at home, as did their youngest, twenty-year-old Catherine. She worked locally, at a financial services call centre handling requests for loans. Another daughter, Emma, worked as an assistant at a private nursing home in Rye, and was expecting a baby. During the decade Barbara had moved up from the shop floor, having started as a checkout assistant. ‘I said to myself, I’m better than this, I need something else.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Free-market economists have argued that there should be no restrictions on capital movements as they allow money to be invested in the most profitable projects worldwide, and thus help the economy operate more efficiently. But it seems clear that countries are much better off if they attract what is known as foreign direct investment (factories, call centres and the like) rather than bank deposits. By its nature, such direct investment is far more likely to be long-lasting; having made all the effort of setting up a factory, a company is likely to think carefully before closing it down. EXCHANGE-RATE CHOICES Earlier chapters have recounted the long struggle by countries to maintain fixed exchange rates and the crises that occurred when they failed to do so.


pages: 357 words: 110,017

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Graeber, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invention of writing, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, plutocrats, private military company, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, South Sea Bubble, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

The watchword was decentralisation: the hundreds of activities once housed in a single corporation could be hived off to smaller and more specialised companies, and co-ordinated by the market using supply chains and networks of astonishing complexity and length.22 Of course, some complained that it went too far—that the costs saved by moving customer care to a call centre in Bangalore or Manila were really just offloaded on to the enraged customers on the other end of the line. But overall, few could deny that in industry after industry the result for the consumer was a phenomenal reduction in costs and improvement in choice. Finance was no stranger to these tectonic shifts in industrial organisation.


pages: 363 words: 107,817

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed by Andrew Jackson (economist), Ben Dyson (economist)

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, David Graeber, debt deflation, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, land bank, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technological determinism, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies

However, they will still incur the costs of administering these accounts (staff wages etc.) and providing services associated with them (cheque books, ATM cards, payment system infrastructure, cash handling etc.). Consequently the banks providing these accounts will need to charge fees to customers to cover their costs and make a profit. Table 6.1: Yearly costs of providing a current account Cheque Book £10 (per book) Debit Card £2 Branch £5 Call Centre £8 Staff £15 Banking IT systems £4 Customer Due Diligence (on account opening) £8 MasterCard/Visa £2 Link (cash machine network) £2 BACS and other payment systems £5 Other IT infrastructure £2 Total £63 Source: Tusmor, a consultancy firm that has been involved in setting up new banks in the UK (http://www.tusmor.com/) How much would the account fees actually be?


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Investment Banks and the Rise of the New Financial System Banks that we do not see: investment banks So far I have talked about the banks we see: the ones with branches on every high street. These are banks like HSBC or NatWest that actively advertise themselves on TV, on billboards and on websites. They remind us how nice they are to their depositors (a free railcard for students! Only UK call centres!). They tell us how willing they are to give us a loan, should we wish to, say, take an impulsive foreign holiday or fulfil our life-long dream of opening a muffin shop. These banks are known as commercial banks or deposit banks.* But then there are banks we do not see. These are known as investment banks.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

When the Xerox 914 turned into a runaway success the Haloid Company renamed itself after its new product, just as Eastman had done. After the copier, Xerox targeted the duplicating process: not quite as fast as printing, but cheaper and simpler. Now it is promoting itself as a publisher of technical manuals, and as a manager of call centres, rather than simply a supplier of photocopying machines. One day paper may no longer be involved, but Xerox plans to continue finding ways of doing the things that photocopying once did for its customers, whatever the media or the means. Kodak did have products aimed at business, but most of its effort concentrated on the domestic consumer; Xerox dominated the workplace.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

If their product or service is deficient, a good company or institution usually wants to hear about it because: 1) It’s the right thing to do 2) You can only learn from your mistakes if you know about them 3) It’s better – especially in an age of social media – to have a satisfied customer than one who will use all available means to slag you off. The world of customer service has to some extent moved on from directly-employed human beings on the end of a telephone to impersonal globalised call centres; from email to text messages; from live chat to social media; from remote desktop support to AI and predictive intelligence tools. Companies which are honest about mistakes, as well as finding a way of talking authentically to their customers, are likely to be valued and trusted more. Many media companies invest heavily in keeping at least some of their customers happy – especially if they are subscribers or can easily switch elsewhere.


pages: 2,020 words: 267,411

Lonely Planet Morocco (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Paul Clammer, Paula Hardy

air freight, Airbnb, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, Day of the Dead, Dr. Strangelove, illegal immigration, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, place-making, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

In the arrivals hall you’ll find currency exchange, an information desk and phone providers where you can equip yourself with a Moroccan SIM card. Royal Air Maroc (RAM; 0524 43 62 05, call centre 0890 00 08 00; www.royalairmaroc.com; 197 Ave Mohammed V; 8.30am-12.20pm & 2.30-7pm) has several flights daily to and from Casablanca (round trip from Dh525, 40 minutes), where you can pick up domestic and international connections. Reconfirm your flight with its 24-hour call centre, and leave extra time for connections in Casablanca. Flights from New York connect to Marrakesh via Casablanca. Bus CTM bus station ( 0524 43 44 02; www.ctm.ma; Rue Abou Bakr Seddiq; 6am-10pm) , southwest of the train station (about 15 minutes on foot), is CTM’s main bus station, from where most services arrive and depart.


Egypt Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, late fees, low cost airline, off grid, place-making, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

The major options: AvisCAR RENTAL (%0100 107 7400; www.avisegypt.com; Airport) BudgetCAR RENTAL (%2265 2395; www.budget.com; Terminal 1, Cairo Airport) EuropcarCAR RENTAL (%0106 661 1027; www.europcar.com/car-EGYPT.html; Terminal 1, Cairo Airport) HertzCAR RENTAL (%0180 000 822; www.hertzegypt.com; Airport) 24hr call centre; also has a branch Downtown ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %2575 8914; www.hertzegypt.com; Ramses Hilton, Corniche el-Nil). Metro The metro is blissfully efficient, inexpensive and, outside rush hours (7am to 9am and 3pm to 6pm), not too crowded. Given the impossible car traffic in Cairo, if you can make even a portion of your journey on the metro, you’ll save time and aggravation.

Martin RandallCULTURAL TOUR (www.martinrandall.com) UK-based experts in cultural tours. On the GoTOUR (www.egyptonthego.com) PADI diving-course holidays. Wind, Sand & StarsTOURS (www.windsandstars.co.uk) A Sinai specialist with desert excursions and retreats. Getting Around Air EgyptAir (MS; %national call centre 0900 70000; www.egyptair.com.eg; h8am-8pm) is the only domestic carrier, and fares can be surprisingly cheap, though they vary considerably depending on season. Domestic one-way fares can be less than US$100. Bicycle Cycle tourism is rare, due to long distances plus intense heat. Winter can be manageable, but even in spring and autumn it’s necessary to make an early-morning start and finish by early afternoon.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

First, as countries grow, they argued, their citizens can afford to start caring about the environment and so begin to demand higher standards; second, the nation’s industries can afford to start using cleaner technologies; and third, those industries will shift from manufacturing to services, swapping smoke stacks for call centres. They might sound credible at first but these explanations for the curve’s rise then fall don’t stand up to scrutiny. First, citizens do not have to wait for GDP growth to deliver them the desire and power to demand clean air and water. That’s what Mariano Torras and James K. Boyce concluded when they matched up the very same cross-country data used to create the Environmental Kuznets Curve with measures of citizen power.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

As I walked around Dharavi, I encountered the different faces of the slum as defined by UN-Habitat, but I also found other things that I was not expecting. Within the area given over to heavy trades I came across ingenuity and a recycling industry that, statistically at least, makes Mumbai the greenest mega-city in the world; in a community centre I found a group of young Muslim women learning English, hoping to gain good jobs in local call centres; every time I looked to the skyline I could spy a mobile-phone mast, while on the central 90Ft Road I found shops and stalls all along the thoroughfare selling the latest smartphones. This reminded me that the slum was part of the city, not apart. The literature of the slums often treats the squatter camps and temporary shelters as a separate place, detached from the rest.


pages: 356 words: 112,271

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response by Tony Connelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, land bank, LNG terminal, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, personalized medicine, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, tech worker, éminence grise

That may mean couriers are less attractive. Lifes2Good has a significant presence online. Individual packages are sent direct to the homes of British consumers. ‘It’s going to be messy where we ship stuff direct to people’s homes – individual parcels, where people log on to a website or ring through a call centre. We fulfil those orders from Ireland. We have a warehouse on site. We’ll ship them overnight to homes in the UK. The cost of that will go up because each shipment will be subject to import duty in the UK. It’s no longer going to another EU member state, which is very clear and very clean. It’s going to a non-EU state.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

But Jones liked the work: he had had some run-ins with the law as a younger man, and issues with both drugs and alcohol that made holding down a job difficult. In the year and a half he had been working for Marriott, however, he had been promoted and given a raise, and he was valued by his superiors. One day in early January, as Jones arrived at the Marriott call centre, a storm was brewing for the company on the other side of the world. An email sent to customers of Marriott’s customer loyalty programme in China included the seemingly innocuous question “What is your country of residence?” Respondents could select from a dropdown menu that included China, Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate potential answers, appearing, in the eyes of Chinese nationalist trolls seeking to take offence, to endorse those territories’ independence from China.3 As outrage built on Chinese social media platforms, egged on by state media, the Shanghai Cyberspace Administration ordered the hotel chain to shut down its Chinese-language website and app for a week in order to “thoroughly clear all erroneous information”, and executives were dragged in for a meeting with tourism officials.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Younger people who grew up in diverse societies consider it normal; they have friends from all different backgrounds and often don’t even think of them as different. Ever more people go to university, which tends to make graduates less susceptible to populism and more open to outsiders.1 Low-paid service workers such as bar staff, carers and call-centre workers who now outnumber the traditional working classes also tend to be more positive about immigrants, perhaps because they have more social contact with them.2 Ever more voters are from an immigrant background, and most support continued openness. Mixed marriages and relationships are multiplying and mixed-race children proliferating.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

But by the 2010s a new spring had arrived, and DeepMind was in the vanguard. Public conversation around AI has been dominated by the risks and rewards of job automation. And yes, this is a significant question. Nonetheless, I have yet to meet an AI scientist motivated by the prospect of automating a call centre. Instead, they are motivated by the prospect of discovery and knowledge far beyond our present abilities. AI scientists are nerds; above all they care about science and ideas. Yet what AI will do to human knowledge, to our ability to comprehend and see and discover and create, has received coverage incommensurate with its potential impact.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

These figures are derived from the international comparisons made by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).18 The International Labour Organization (ILO) provides slightly higher estimates, but the international pattern is the same.19 However, most people who work in financial services undertake mundane clerical tasks in bank branches, call centres and insurance offices. Four hundred thousand people work in ‘the City’, the geographical area round the Bank of England that is headquarters to most British financial institutions.20 Of these, 150,000 work for financial institutions. Cleaners, security guards and chefs in financial institutions may or may not be included depending on whether the institutions in which they work have outsourced these functions (mostly they have).


pages: 467 words: 116,094

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre

Aaron Swartz, call centre, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Desert Island Discs, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Helicobacter pylori, jimmy wales, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, meta-analysis, moral panic, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, Simon Singh, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, the scientific method, Turing test, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

When you forget about numerical constraints, all kinds of things can start to look spooky: in a group of twenty-three people, there is a 50 per cent chance that two of them will share a birthday, because any pair of birthdays on any date is acceptable. When you forget about numerical context, things can look weird too: if Uri Geller gets a nation in front of the telly to tap their broken watches against the screen, and ring the call centre if the watch starts ticking again, then with viewing figures of a few million there will be more excited calls than the switchboard can handle. If you turned to your friend and said, ‘You know, a lot of funny things have happened to me, quite unexpectedly, over the course of a lifetime, but let me take a moment to specify right now the one thing that would seriously freak me out, over the next twelve hours, which would be if my dog trod on the trigger of my gun, and accidentally shot me in the face,’ and then your dog shot you in the calf, that would be weird.


pages: 427 words: 124,692

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

Colonel Mordaunt commanded his bodyguard. * Without the Anglo-Indian community, it is fair to say, the railways, telephone exchanges and customs service of British India could not have functioned. Since independence they have found life harder, although their excellent command of colloquial English has ensured jobs in places like call centres. They have all sorts of unexpected talents. At an Anglo-Indian tea party in Chennai, one of the prominent members of the local community turned to me proudly and pointed out how well everyone danced. ‘It’s part of our heritage,’ he said, ‘natural rhythm. We got it from the British.’ * Like the great orientalist Sir William Jones, Stuart is buried among dozens of less culturally sympathetic colonists in South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta.


Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

The click of a key can send a letter, blueprints, manufacturing instructions, or money across the ocean in a second. Even professional services are being decentralized to distant sites; for instance, in some US hospitals, interpreting X-rays is now electronically outsourced to radiologists in India and Thailand.79 Call centres in India are pitching rug-cleaning services to households in Toronto or New York. Such are the realignments of consumer markets. The rapid circulation of information and capital is stimulating the movement of workers across national borders. Tasks that engaged numerous workers previously are increasingly being done by a few with the help of computers.


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

Buurtzorg started out with one team of four nurses in Enschede, a Dutch city of 150,000 on the country’s eastern fringes. Today, it numbers more than eight hundred teams active nationwide. However, it’s not what the organisation is, but what it is not, that sets Buurtzorg apart. It has no managers, no call centre and no planners. There are no targets or bonuses. Overheads are negligible and so is time spent in meetings. Buurtzorg doesn’t have a flashy HQ in the capital, but occupies an uninspiring block in an ugly business park in outlying Almelo. Each team of twelve has maximum autonomy. Teams plan their own schedules and employ their own co-workers.


pages: 536 words: 126,051

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion by Dean Burnett

airport security, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, call centre, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, COVID-19, double empathy problem, emotional labour, experimental economics, fake it until you make it, fake news, fear of failure, heat death of the universe, impulse control, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, neurotypical, New Journalism, period drama, pre–internet, Snapchat, social distancing, theory of mind, TikTok, Wall-E

The ability to control a room full of rowdy individuals, who may have zero interest in what you’re saying, is a valuable transferable skill in this case. ||| Multiple people have assured me that this is a real thing. ## Jobs requiring a significant degree of emotional suppression have been shown to make workers more prone to depression and anxiety. Retail and call centre jobs are the most frequently cited examples, as they regularly involve the need to remain civil while being harangued by belligerent customers. *** Most people consider me to be very Welsh, but Carys makes me look like someone who just visited Wales once for a weekend holiday. ††† The model that argues there are five sequential stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Fear, Bargaining, Acceptance.


pages: 476 words: 134,735

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science by Will Storr

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, full employment, George Santayana, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jon Ronson, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Simon Singh, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, the scientific method, theory of mind, twin studies

We walked through the night, past vast Communist-built blocks that have been crowned with the neon hoardings of the conquering capitalists. My fellow holidaymakers are all men. As well as Alex and Mark there is a wealthy businessman who flew himself here in his own light aeroplane; a shorts-wearing university employee from America’s wheat-belt with a huge rectangular bottom; a tall Australian call-centre operative with a German name; a genuine German who flew MiGs for the East German airforce; a lorry driver from Maidstone; and a man in his sixties with a sharp public school accent who was born in colonial Kenya. All of them are immaculately ironed and tucked in. Three of them have moustaches. We drifted into pairs as we walked, and I fell into conversation with Alex, the Australian who enjoyed the purity of Dresden.


pages: 441 words: 135,176

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

Such chambers are not necessarily the embodiment of elevated ideals. Politics in the raw mostly looks about as interesting as a reading from the telephone directory. There are endless procedural discussions, nit-picking points of order and for most of the day people sit in rooms, shuffle paper, talk on the phone and check their e-mails as if they were in a call centre. The struggle to make something out of this deeply unpromising material is the real story of the design of Miralles’s parliament. This is also the story, although one with a very different outcome, of London’s new City Hall. The London Assembly’s 500 staff and 26 members could easily have been accommodated in an anonymous office building with no public recognition or iconographic significance.


pages: 457 words: 143,967

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market by Philip Augar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business logic, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, family office, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, light touch regulation, loadsamoney, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Sloane Ranger, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, vertical integration, wikimedia commons, yield curve

A few weeks later, though, Barrett sprung a surprise by making him finance director, a role for which Varley’s skills and experience were well suited. His successor as head of retail, Stewart, was undoubtedly a very good banker. He had joined Woolwich as a branch manager, had worked his way up the organization and front-line staff loved him. He would talk to customers in branches and pick up the phone in call centres. He had turned Woolwich round and was expected to do the same at Barclays. But the Barclays retail bankers were ready for him. He was a practical man rather than a political operator and the Barclays machine wrapped him in red tape. Meetings were mysteriously difficult to arrange, were cancelled at the last minute or flooded with officials.


Ukraine by Lonely Planet

Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, gentrification, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, low cost airline, megacity, Skype, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route

But to do it yourself, you need to speak some Ukrainian/Russian and know the exact addresses of your departure point and destination – saying something like ‘drop me off at Maydan’ won’t get you anywhere. If you dial a taxi service number, they usually hang up and call you back immediately. Troyka ( 233 7733, 237 0047) is a reliable call centre working with several taxi companies. If you flag a car in the street – as many people still do – always agree on the price before getting inside, unless it is an official metered taxi. Taking standing taxis from outside hotels, as well as train and bus stations, inevitably incurs a much higher price.


pages: 349 words: 134,041

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Brownian motion, business logic, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, disinformation, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass affluent, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Salesforce, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, technology bubble, the medium is the message, the new new thing, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, volatility smile, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Clo notes Principal and interest Corporate loans Senior notes Investment Loan principal and interest Principal and interest Special Purpose Vehicle Sponsor bank Sales proceeds Assignment/ subparticipation of principal and interest Mezzanine notes Investment Return Equity Investment Servicing agreement Figure 9.2 Collateralized loan obligation (CLO) DAS_C10.QXD 5/3/07 284 7:59 PM Page 284 Tr a d e r s , G u n s & M o n e y Transferring the loans from the bank to the SPV proved hideously complicated. To do it properly, you had to get the borrower to agree; some banks were too scared even to try. Most did ‘participations’, which created huge legal and customer relations problems. One bank tried to do a securitization of its corporate loan book using participations: it had to set up a call centre to respond to queries from agitated clients who wanted to know if their loan was being sold. Many corporate loans are ‘revolvers’. The borrower can repay the loan and then later re-borrow the money – it’s the corporate equivalent of the credit card. The problem was that if the borrower repaid the money it flowed out to investors.


pages: 501 words: 134,867

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice by Tony Weis, Joshua Kahn Russell

addicted to oil, Bakken shale, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, failed state, gentrification, global village, green new deal, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, liberal capitalism, LNG terminal, market fundamentalism, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, profit maximization, public intellectual, race to the bottom, smart grid, special economic zone, WikiLeaks, working poor

For example, 75 per cent of global exploration and mining projects are headquartered in Canada.1 As manufacturing jobs were outsourced to the Global South to find cheaper pools of labour, resource-extractive industries required an “in-sourcing” of cheap labour to work in the dangerous production of dirty energy and the economy around it. This led to a drastic surge in Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, bringing in hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Migrant workers are the flipside of outsourcing; they are essentially the same labour pool as those who are working in sweatshops, call centres, and factories across the Global South to fill the consumption needs of the Global North and the global elite. They work without health and safety protections, their pay is less than minimum wage, they are often forced to live in dangerous and isolated work camps, they are legally tied down and indentured to a single employer, and their legal immigration status is temporary and precarious.


pages: 489 words: 132,734

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

In Slumdog Millionaire, the 2008 blockbuster film that reintroduced Mumbai to the world, the protagonist, Jamal, and his brother, Salim, gasp at the prowess of neocapitalist India while looking out across a development of neoclassical high-rise towers. To a Western audience, the development looks like Caesars Palace in Las Vegas—only much, much bigger. “Can you believe it?” Salim asks. “This was our slum. We lived just there, huh? Now it is business, apartments, call centres. . . . Fuck USA, fuck China. India is at the centre of the world now.” The fantastical cluster of thirty-story columned high-rises, looking like ancient Greek temples stretched into modern skyscrapers, is no computer-generated image. It is an actual real estate development set on parkland abutting a British-built reservoir several miles north of the historic heart of the city.


Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

International Calls Official telephone (call) centres are sometimes the only way to call overseas, though sometimes this can be done on the street too, through vendors offering use of their mobile phones. Generally, it costs about US$5 per minute to call Australia or Europe and US$6 per minute to phone North America. You’ll usually be asked to pay in US dollars. In March 2011 the authorities banned Skype and other internet-based call services at internet cafes, as the lower rates charged for such calls was impacting the revenue made at government call centres. To call Myanmar from abroad, dial your country’s international access code, then 95 (Myanmar’s country code), the area code (minus the ‘0’) and the five- or six-digit number.

This doesn’t necessarily mean bringing a friend from home; you can often pair up with other travellers you meet on the way. Work Teaching English is the easiest way to support yourself in Southeast Asia. For short-term gigs, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and Jakarta have language schools and a high turnover of staff. In the Philippines, English speakers are often needed as language trainers for call centres. In Indonesia and Thailand you may be able to find some dive-school work. Payaway (www.payaway.co.uk) provides a handy online list of language schools and volunteer groups looking for recruits for its Southeast Asian programs. Transitions Abroad (www.transitionsabroad.com) is a web portal that covers all aspects of overseas life, including landing a job in a variety of fields.


pages: 547 words: 148,799

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

call centre, land reform, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, urban decay

He’s a colleague, so watch what you say next, alright.’ ‘You know he’s working a Cono Sur portfolio at the moment? Running contacts through Carlos Caffarini out of Buenos Aires?’ ‘Yeah, I heard. Didn’t know it was Caffarini, but—‘ ‘It isn’t any more,’ said Lopez abruptly. ‘Last week Bryant canned Caffarini because there were call-centre strikes in Santiago, and he didn’t see it coming. Or maybe he didn’t think it was important enough to chase. Now he’s on a ventilator in intensive care until his health cover runs out, and some fucking seventeen-year-old is running the portfolio at a quarter the old retainer. They were only strikes, Chris.


pages: 868 words: 147,152

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

In short, productivity gains in services are inherently slower than in manufacturing because there is greater dependence in the former on people and on enhancing human skills.2 The second reason why manufacturing is so important is another relative advantage that it has over the service sector. This is that manufactures are much more freely traded in the world than services. Most manufactures can be put in containers and shipped to anyone willing to pay for them. Trade in services faces more practical and political impediments. In practical terms, some services – like call centres or software – are sold at distance down phone and computer lines. But most services require goods or people to travel in two directions, adding time and cost. It is not typically viable, for instance, to send bicycles to India for repairs, or to fly heart-attack patients around the world before operating on them.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

At the time of writing, the British coal industry employs 5,700 people, about 1,600 of whom are members of the NUM, with just over 1,000 in the UDM.37 Where the pits used to be there are now country parks or urban developments such as leisure and retail centres. The thriving miners’ welfare club in Brampton village, where it all began, was vandalized but reinvented to become a social club for plumbers, caretakers, shop-fitters and call-centre staff, there being no miners left in the vicinity. In Shirebrook, on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, former strikers and strike-breakers still drank in separate pubs, twenty years later.38 CHAPTER 9 FEED THE WORLD Bob Geldof had been through the roller-coaster of show-business since moving to London from his native Ireland.


pages: 517 words: 155,209

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, clean water, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, land tenure, mental accounting, microdosing, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, off grid, off-the-grid, Right to Buy, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Later, down again and at a checkpoint to the other side, the man who’d volunteered to guide us through lost his rag with the young soldiers who had decided to make us, for no discernible reason, wait. In the heat. And I got so polite inside myself. Willed him to stop being antagonistic with them. Forgot how fast I like to walk. Hate security in airports or the time lost in call centre queues while he, along with everyone he knows, spends his life waiting for that arbitrary Stop to be Go. Not ten minutes. Hours of the day. Years of life. Wasting in the delay. Inside, finally, and there was the sound. The press of people herded into too little room, and open eared I went through the streets.


Barcelona by Damien Simonis

Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land reform, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, retail therapy, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

They accept coins, tarjetas telefónicas (phonecards) issued by the national phone company Telefónica and, in some cases, credit cards. Tarjetas telefónicas come in €6 and €12 denominations and are sold at post offices and tobacconists. Public telephones inside bars and cafes, and phones in hotel rooms, are nearly always more expensive than street payphones. Locutorios (call centres) are another option. You’ll mostly find these scattered about the old town, especially in and around El Raval. Check rates before making calls. Increasingly, these double as internet centres. To call Barcelona from outside Spain, dial the international access code, followed by the code for Spain (34) and the full number (including Barcelona’s area code, 93, which is an integral part of the number).


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

That is what I thought, until one day I tried to have an unnecessary conversation on a mobile telephone while a man was using a leaf-blower nearby. Even if everybody lags his loft and switches to compact fluorescent light bulbs, and throws out his patio heaters and gets his power from more efficient power stations, and loses his job in a steel plant but gets a new one in a call centre, the falling energy intensity of the economy will be offset by the new opportunities wealth brings to use energy in new ways. Cheap light bulbs let people plug in more lights. Silicon chips use so little power that they are everywhere and in aggregate their effect mounts up. A search engine may not use as much energy as a steam engine, but lots of them soon add up.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, for example, argued in 2003 ‘that the most important and most universal factor supporting world-wide disinflation has been the mutually reinforcing mix of deregulation and globalization, and the consequent significant reduction in monopoly pricing power’.56 An aspect of this was the fall in the dollar prices of many manufactured commodities and labour-intensive services (such as call centres). This, in turn, was partly due to the entry of low-cost producers into the world economy on prices and partly due to the rapid decline in the prices of anything incorporating information and communications technology. Moore’s law – the exponential fall in the cost of computing power first noticed by Gordon Moore of Intel in 1965 – continued to operate.57 In itself, the fall in prices should not affect overall inflation in the medium run.


Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Central branches with late hours include Charlottenburg (Europa Presse Center, Tauentzienstrasse 9; 8am-10.30pm Mon-Fri, to 10pm Sat, 11am-8pm Sun; Zoologischer Garten, Zoo logischer Garten) and Mitte (Grunerstrasse 20; 8am-9pm Mon-Sat; Alexanderplatz, Alexanderplatz). Tourist Information The city tourist board, Visit Berlin (2500 2333; www.visitberlin.de), operates four walk-in offices and a call centre with multilingual staff who field general questions and can make hotel and ticket bookings. Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburger Tor, Pariser Platz; 9.30am-7pm daily; Brandenburger Tor, Brandenburger Tor) Extended hours April to October. TICKETS & PASSES »One ticket is good on all forms of public transport.

Central Berlin (defined as the area bounded by the S-Bahn circle line) is a restricted low-emission zone, which means all cars entering it need an Umweltplakette (emission sticker). See p783 for details. Public Transport Berlin’s public-transport system is run by BVG (194 49; www.bvg.de) and consists of the U-Bahn, S-Bahn, regional trains, buses and trams. Get trip planning and general information via the BVG call centre or online. Bus Buses are slow but useful for city sightseeing on the cheap. They run frequently between 4.30am and 12.30am. Night buses take over in the interim, running roughly every 30 minutes. MetroBuses, designated M19, M41 etc, operate 24/7. Buses 100 and 200 follow routes linking major sights.

The tourist office has free brochures on various local cycling paths. The excellent 1:150,000-scale cycling map Radtouren rund um Speyer (Bicycle Touring Around Speyer; €2) is sold at the tourist office and bookshops. Information ATMs (Maximilianstrasse 47 & 49) Near the Altpörtel. City-Call-Center (Bahnhofstrasse 3; per hr €1; 10am-9pm Mon-Sat, noon-9pm Sun) Internet access half-a-block north of the Altpörtel. Post Office (Wormser Strasse 4) A block north of Maximilianstrasse 61. Tourist Office (142 392; www.speyer.de; Maximilianstrasse 13; 9am-5pm Mon-Fri year-round, 10am-3pm Sat, 10am-2pm Sun & holidays Apr-Oct, 10am-noon Sat Nov-Mar) Situated 200m west of the Dom, next to the historic Rathaus.


pages: 638 words: 156,653

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Skype, starchitect, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Toilets in shopping centres, some cafés and restaurants and public venues are often attended by a cleaner who either charges a flat fee (say, €0.50) or expects a small tip. Return to beginning of chapter TOURIST INFORMATION The local tourist board, Berlin Tourismus Marketing (BTM; www.visitberlin.de), operates five walk-in offices (called Berlin Infostores) and a call centre ( 250 025; 8am-7pm Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm Sat & Sun) whose multilingual staff field general questions and make hotel and ticket bookings. From April to October office hours are usually extended to 8pm. Berlin Infostore Alexa Shopping Mall (Map; ground fl, Grunerstrasse 20, near Alexanderplatz; 10am-8pm Mon-Sat; Alexanderplatz) Berlin Infostore Brandenburger Tor (Map; south wing; 10am-7pm; Unter den Linden) Berlin Infostore Hauptbahnhof (Map; Europaplatz north exit; 8am-10pm; Hauptbahnhof) Berlin Infostore Neues Kranzler Eck (Map; Kurfürstendamm 21; 10am-8pm Mon-Sat, to 6pm Sun; Kurfürstendamm) Berlin Infostore Pavillon am Reichstag (Map; Scheidemannstrasse; 10am-6pm; 100) Euraide (Map; www.euraide.de; Hauptbahnhof; 10am-7pm daily May-Aug, 11am-6pm Mon-Fri Sep-Apr; Hauptbahnhof) Inside the Reisezentrum on the lower level (B1), this helpful office is staffed with English speakers who can assist with all train-related issues (rail passes, tickets) and other travel-related topics.


The Rough Guide to Jamaica by Thomas, Polly,Henzell, Laura.,Coates, Rob.,Vaitilingam, Adam.

buttonwood tree, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, ghettoisation, jitney, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sustainable-tourism, trade route

Post office West End Rd next to A FiWi Plaza; Mon–Fri 9am to 5pm. Telephones and communications Phone boxes opposite the main craft market and at Plaza de Negril; phonecards available from pharmacies or the post office. Phone booths available at Sunshine Village, by Catcha Falling Star hotel, and by the House of Dread bar. The Negril Calling Centre (9am–11pm) in Plaza de Negril offers relatively cheap calls, as does Bluewater Internet Centre. North and east of Negril After Negril’s glittering hedonism, the rest of western Jamaica can come as quite a surprise. Restaurants remain wholeheartedly traditional, with mannish water and eye-rollingly insouciant service replacing waffles and exhortations to “have a nice day”.


Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

Jews who entered London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could obtain funding from the Board of Guardians from 1866.37 In recent decades some migrants have secured money from groups of friends and relatives, partly because of the fear of rejection based on racism if approaching banks. For example, in the case of one Somali business owner in North London, ‘more than 25 friends, acquaintances and relations had contributed a total of £7,000 (in the form of an interest-free loan) out of the £8,000 required to start and run a telephone call centre for the first six months of its existence’.38 A complexity of factors has therefore facilitated the growth of migrant small businesses in London’s history, a process which has its origins in the early modern period,39 with the Huguenots who settled in Spitalfields regarded as pioneers in this process.40 While some migrant groups appear more entrepreneurial than others, as supported by statistics, it seems that virtually all ethnic minorities have opened small businesses, providing a means of social mobility and helping in the assimilation process.41 THE IRISH As with much else in the migrant history of London the entrepreneurial activities of the Irish, together with Jews, differ from other twentieth-century arrivals because of the longevity of their presence in the capital.


pages: 1,429 words: 189,336

Mauritius, Réunion & Seychelles Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, place-making, restrictive zoning, spice trade, trade route, urban sprawl

For most of those decades, the catch cry for economic policymakers in Mauritius has been diversification – away from sugar cane, then away from textile manufacturing in the face of competition from China, and so on. And it’s a challenge that the country has largely met. Moves towards what former prime minister Paul Bérenger described as a 'quantum leap' to transform Mauritius into a 'knowledge island’, canny forays into the world of international banking and establishing Mauritius as call-centre hub all helped. From 2010 until 2015, at a time when developed economies across the world were foundering, Mauritius maintained growth at a highly respectable 3% to 4%. With unemployment below 8% and GDP per capita rising to nearly US$20,000 in 2015, these are no abstract economic numbers but the outward signs of an economy that continues to bring significant benefits to its people.


Scandinavia by Andy Symington

call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, connected car, edge city, Eyjafjallajökull, full employment, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, period drama, retail therapy, Skype, the built environment, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city, work culture , young professional

Forex (www.forex.fi; 8am-9pm Mon-Fri, 9am-7pm Sat & Sun) At Pohjoisesplanadi 27 and at the train station; the best place to change cash or travellers cheques. Post & Telephone Main post office (www.posti.fi; Mannerheiminaukio 1; 7am-9pm Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm Sat & Sun) Between the bus and train stations. There are almost no phone booths in Finland, but there’s a call centre here. Tourist Information Helsinki City Tourist Office ( 3101 3300; www.visithelsinki.fi; Pohjoisesplanadi 19; 9am-8pm Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm Sat & Sun) Busy multilingual office with booking desk. In summer, they send out uniformed ‘Helsinki Helpers’ – grab one on the street and ask away. A cut-down version of the city tourism website can be delivered to your mobile at www.helsinki.mobi.


Egypt Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, G4S, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, late fees, low cost airline, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

Post DHL (9 Sharia Salah Salem; 9am-5pm Sat-Thu) Main post office (Sharia al-Bursa al-Qadima; 9am-9pm Sat-Thu) Just east of Midan Orabi; several other branches are dotted around the city. Telephone Menatel cardphones can be found all over the city, although the policy of placing them on street corners can make it hard to hear and be heard. Private call centres are a more convenient option. You can also buy an inexpensive prepaid SIM card for your unlocked mobile phone. Telephone centrale (Sharia Saad Zaghloul; 8.30am-10pm) Vodafone main office (13 Sharia Salah Salem; 9am-11pm Sat-Thu, 1.30-11pm Fri); Radio Shack (68 Sharia Safiyya Zaghloul; 11am-midnight) Vodafone’s main office and the desk at Radio Shack sell cash (prepaid) SIM cards for E£20.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

There’s culture, heritage and some of Britain’s most elegant streets, while the absolutely brilliant and alternative Ouseburn testifies to a nightlife beyond the alco-pop shots and high-octane cheesefest favoured by so many hen and stag parties. * * * DID YOU KNOW? The Northeast is the call-centre capital of England, mostly because the area desperately needed to attract jobs to the region following the demise of traditional industry. But another reason might have to do with the distinctive accent, which polls have shown to be the friendliest and most trustworthy of all English accents! * * * When you do come, take a moment to cherish the city’s greatest strength: the locals.

Traveline ( 0871 200 2233; www.traveline.org.uk) is a very useful information service covering bus, coach, taxi and train services nationwide, with numerous links to help plan your journey. By phone, you get transferred automatically to an advisor in the region you’re phoning from; for details on another part of the country, you need to key in a code number ( 81 for London, 874 for Cumbria, etc) – for a full list, go to the Traveline home page and click on ‘call centre codes’. A final note: travelling between England, Scotland and Wales is easy. The bus and train systems are fully integrated and in most cases you won’t even know you’ve crossed the border. Passports are not required – although some Scots and Welsh may think they should be! Return to beginning of chapter AIR Britain’s domestic air companies include British Airways, BMI, bmibaby, easyJet and Ryanair.


pages: 1,013 words: 302,015

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

But under the more familiar distinctions, where the working class were defined as socio-economic groups C2, D and E, there were around twenty-two million members of this supposedly endangered sector of the population at the end of the 1990s. Even in the exciting new world of technology, most of the jobs created were low-paid and low-skilled; the rise of the call centre merely provided a modern twist on the sweatshop. The reality was still a country deeply divided by class: working hours were longer in Britain than in any of its EU partners, while chief executives’ pay was higher. Labour’s rhetoric in opposition about fat cats didn’t seem to have made much impact.


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

Free & Toll Numbers 0800 numbers are free, 0810 and 0820 cost 0.10c and 0.20c respectively per minute, and 0900 numbers are exorbitant and best avoided. Mobile Numbers Austrian mobile ( Handy ) telephone numbers begin with 0650 or higher up to 0683. Public Telephones These take phone-cards or coins; €0.20 is the minimum for a local call. Call centres are also widespread, and many internet cafes are geared for Skype calls. Roaming The network works on GSM 1800 and is compatible with GSM 900 phones; it is not compatible with systems from the USA unless the mobile phone is at least a tri-band model. Roaming can get very expensive if your provider is outside the EU.


The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...) by Dan Richardson, Daniel Jacobs

Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, disinformation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Livingstone, I presume, satellite internet, self-driving car, sexual politics, Skype, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

Airlines Austrian (also Lufthansa and Swiss), 6 Sharia Sheikh al-Marsafi, Zamalek 02 2269 0971; British Airways, City Star Complex, Sharia al-Forsan, Heliopolis 02 2480 0380; EgyptAir, 9 Sharia Talaat Harb 02 2392 7664, and 6 Sharia Adly 02 2390 0999, airport 02 2267 7010, call centre 0900 70000; Emirates, 18 Sharia Batal Ahmed Abdel Aziz, Mohandiseen 19899; Ethiopian Airlines, 3A Sharia Rafat Saleh Tawfik (off Farid Semeka Hegaz), Heliopolis 02 2621 4934; Etihad, World Trade Center, 1191 Corniche al-Nil, Bulaq 02 2578 1303; Kenya Airways, 11 Sharia Qasr al-Nil 02 2579 8529; Royal Jordanian, 6 Sharia Qasr al-Nil 02 2575 0614.


Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

The most convenient branches for visitors: Charlottenburg (Map; Joachimsthaler Strasse 7; 9am-8pm Mon-Fri, 10am-8pm Sat) Mitte (Map; Rathausstrasse 5; 8am-7pm Mon-Fri, 8am-4pm Sat) Potsdamer Platz (Map; inside Potsdamer Platz Arkaden; 10am-10pm Mon-Sat) Return to beginning of chapter Tourist Information The city tourist board, Berlin Tourismus Marketing (BTM; www.visitberlin.de) operates four walk-in offices and a call centre ( 250 025; 8am-7pm Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm Sat & Sun) whose multilingual staff field general questions and can make hotel and ticket bookings. From April to October, all branches except Hauptbahnhof keep extended hours. Berlin Infostore Alexa Shopping Center (Map; ground fl, Grunerstrasse 20, near Alexanderplatz; 10am-8pm Mon-Sat) Berlin Infostore Brandenburger Tor (Map; south wing; 10am-6pm) Berlin Infostore Hauptbahnhof (Map; ground fl, enter from Europaplatz; 8am-10pm) Berlin Infostore Neues Kranzler Eck (Map; Kurfürstendamm 21; 10am-8pm Mon-Sat, 10am-6pm Sun) Euraide (Map; www.euraide.de; Hauptbahnhof; 10am-7pm daily May-Aug, 11am-6pm Mon-Fri Sep-Apr, closed 23 Dec-15 Feb) Inside the Reisezentrum on the lower level (B1), this independent office is staffed with fluent English speakers eager to assist you with all train-related issues (rail passes, tickets) and other travel-related topics.

The Hauptbahnhof is about 1km north of the Altpörtel. Return to beginning of chapter Information For the price of a mobile phone call, you can get historical details on seven city sights by dialling 0911-810 940 043 and then the number marked on the attraction. ATMs (Maximilianstrasse 47 & 49) Near the Altpörtel. City-Call-Center (Bahnhofstrasse 3; per hr €1; 10am-9pm Mon-Sat, noon-9pm Sun) Internet access, half a block north of the Altpörtel. Post office (Wormser Strasse 4) Situated a block north of Maximilianstrasse 61. Tourist office ( 142 392; www.speyer.de; Maximilianstrasse 13; 9am-5pm Mon-Fri year-round, 10am-3pm Sat, 10am-2pm Sun & holidays Apr-Oct, 10am-noon Sat Nov-Mar) Next to the historic Rathaus, 200m west of the Dom.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

In the few cases where claimed figures are available, even the very non-specific figures for password resets of US$100-200 per user per year seem to come from the same place that the BSA and RIAA get their piracy figures from (at that price Facebook and MySpace would be spending about 20 billion US dollars a year on password management). A far more believable figure for the cost of password resets comes from the large-scale Windows Live study mentioned earlier, which gives a figure of 1.5% of users forgetting their passwords per month [12]. Assuming that it takes a rather pessimistic five minutes on the phone to a call-centre in Asia with operating costs that are typically in the region of US$5 an hour, this comes to about 8 cents per user per year, a far cry from US$200 per year, and even that’s only for the few high-security systems that don’t use email-based password resets, which would drive the overall average cost even lower.

Technically there’s a Terms of Service (ToS) agreement covering use of the data but there’s no way to monitor compliance with this (or to police the behaviour of Facebook applications in general [526]), and once the information has been leaked it’s too late to do anything about it. Application developers know about this, and are quite happy to exploit it (for some years Facebook’s unofficial policy on abuse was that they would only take action “when the violations were so egregious that [the Facebook] call center was getting flooded with complaints” [527]). For example one very popular Facebook application solicited personal comments on Facebook friends and then later offered to sell the information to the targets of the comments [528][529]. In other cases private data on Facebook users was released either through deliberate (and ToS-skirting) leaks to facilitate third-party advertising [530][531] or through vulnerabilities in the application [532], or just through general-purpose data-mining techniques that took advantage of weaknesses in Facebook’s privacy and security model [533][534] (there’s even a special conference, the Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, that covers this sort of thing).


pages: 242 words: 245

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

The Omnitech survey shows a slow but steady trend toward the outsourcing of call centers. In 1991, about 90 percent of call centers were kept in house, but by 1996 this figure had fallen to 80 percent, and in 2002 the figure was estimated to fall by another 10 percent.11 A graph published in the April 1999 issue of Call Center Solutions, also shows a spectacular increase from 1997 onward in the percentage of call center transactions conducted by means other than the telephone—principally by E-mail and the Internet.12 83 84 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY Call Center Solutions (CCS) is a good place to begin our study, because it is the industry's leading trade journal, with the largest circulation and the most comprehensive coverage of the industry's new products.

Sixty-four percent said that monitoring made it hard to get up for a break, even to go to the bathroom.14 Still another telling category of evidence supports the Radclyffe Group's findings about the "negative call center culture." Job turnover at call centers is exceptionally high as employees vote with their feet and leave the digital assembly lines in droves. At the sixty-two call centers surveyed in 1998 by the consultants Omnitech, the mean annual rate of employee turnover was 24 percent.15 Dina Vance of the consultancy FTR Inc., and a leading expert on the call center operations of the financial services industry, estimated the annual turnover rates at her industry's call centers to be around 39 percent.16 Mike McGrath, chief organizer for Local 1026 of the CWA in Tucson, puts annual turnover at some of the city's call centers even higher, at between 50 and 60 percent.17 Contributors to CCS often remind readers about the industry's very high rates of employee turnover.

In all transactions with the customer, the agent must also work toward the "soft" objective of cementing the customer's loyalty to the company. In a survey of in-house corporate call centers carried out in March 1998 by IT consultancy Omnitech, 32 percent of call centers surveyed were devoted to banking, 27 percent to managed health care, 16 percent to retail brokering, and 14 percent to retail telecom—that is, the dealings between AT&T and Verizon, and their customers about billings or changes to service.10 In the call center industry there is also an important distinction to be drawn between those call centers that are kept in house by companies, and those that are outsourced to independent service bureaus.


pages: 294 words: 77,356

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

According to a 2010 USDA report, a food stamp (called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, after 2008) recipient added the call center number to her cell phone plan’s “friends and family” list because she spent so much time on the phone with them. Applicants who failed to successfully complete their phone interview were terminated for failing to cooperate in eligibility determination. Says Andree, “It was a terrible, terrible, terrible system.” Private call center workers were not adequately trained to deal with the severity of challenges faced by callers, nor were they provided with sufficient information about applicable regulations. Advocates report call center operators bursting into tears on the phone.

The failure to cooperate notice had originally been sent to an outdated address, which delayed its delivery. Now Shelli, in a panic, phoned the call center. An ACS worker told her to try to correct her application online. When that failed, she and her boyfriend Jeff Stewart phoned the call center several more times, trying to identify the problem. “I started reading her letters to figure out what to do, and where to go, and who to call,” Jeff remembered, “but you couldn’t get anywhere on the phone. It was like you were talking to a computer instead of a person.” On July 11, call center operators connected Shelli with one of the few remaining state caseworkers in Marion, who told her that she had neglected to sign a required form but did not tell her which one.

So she went to her local Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) office in Tipton, spoke to a caseworker, and asked to have the application put on hold. The Tipton caseworker told her that, because of recent changes at FSSA, application decisions were no longer made at the local level. She would have to speak with a call center operator in Marion, 40 miles away. Kim called the Marion office and was told that her application “would be taken care of.” Neither the Tipton caseworker nor the Marion call center operator told Kim that she had to sign paperwork declaring that she was stopping the application process. Nor did they tell her that her failed attempt to get health insurance for herself and her husband might impact her children’s coverage.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

I hear him ask, wearily, before the door closes behind me. I knew I wanted to work in a call center for the second part. Call-center jobs may be stereotypically outsourced to India or the Philippines, but the industry employs around five million US workers—that’s around one out of every twenty-five American jobs. And, like Amazon, call centers are one of very few sectors of the economy that have been expanding through the recession. The sector is profitable and growing, and its labor practices are likely to spread. Plus, when I started trying to figure out where I should get a job, the stuff I heard from call-center reps* was just as insane as what I’d heard from Amazon workers.

MARSHALL: A little bit about Convergys for those of you that’ve never worked for us before. We’re the second-largest call-center company in the world. We generate over $3 billion of revenue every year. We have 130,000 employees! STEVE: We! Are! Huge! We are the biggest company in the US that does call-center customer service—the second biggest in the whole world. MARSHALL: Forty-seven different languages and thirty-one different countries—N huì shuō Zhōngwén ma? Sprechen sie Deutsch? Habla español? Parlez-vous français? We have call centers literally from Dublin, Ireland, to Beijing, China, and everywhere in between. STEVE: Right now, we have six hundred employees inside this building.

We’re getting abused on both ends, from the customers and the companies, and people wonder why agents have depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. There’s a huge body of research1 directly linking repetitive, low-control, high-stress work with increased risk of mental-health issues—particularly depression and anxiety. Many of these studies were actually conducted in call centers because they’re such a perfect model of a low-control, high-stress workplace. One recent study2 concluded: Call center employees are expected to express positive emotions and suppress negative emotions like frustration, resentment and anger in their interactions with customers so as to create a desired state of mind in the customer. If not given a healthy expressive outlet, this emotional repression can profoundly affect a person psychologically.


pages: 222 words: 75,778

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

call centre, crowdsourcing, drop ship, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

Part of the problem was the high cost of living, and part of the problem was the culture. Working in a call center just wasn’t something that people in the Bay Area wanted to do. Toward the end of 2003, we started looking around at different options for expanding our call center. We initially considered outsourcing our call center overseas to India or the Philippines, but we remembered our hard lesson from working with eLogistics: Never outsource your core competency. If we were trying to build our brand to be about the very best customer service, we knew that we shouldn’t be outsourcing that department. Wherever we decided to open up our call center, we had to own and run it ourselves.

Seeing every interaction through a branding lens instead of an expense-minimization lens means we run our call center very differently from most call centers. Most call centers measure their employees’ performance based on what’s known in the industry as “average handle time,” which focuses on how many phone calls each rep can take in a day. This translates into reps worrying about how quickly they can get a customer off the phone, which in our eyes is not delivering great customer service. Most call centers also have scripts and force their reps to try to upsell customers to generate additional revenue.

After some research, we narrowed the list of possible locations down to Phoenix, Louisville, Portland, Des Moines, Sioux City, and Las Vegas. Our original plan was simply to open up a satellite call center, but as we thought more about it, we realized that if we did that, our actions wouldn’t really be matching our words. To build the Zappos brand into being about the very best customer service, we needed to make sure customer service was the entire company, not just a department. We needed to move our entire headquarters from San Francisco to wherever we wanted to build out our call center, which we had recently named our Customer Loyalty Team (or just CLT). A few of us discussed this at lunch one day and thought about the different options we had.


pages: 187 words: 55,801

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

As he was NEW DIVISIONS OF LABOR 3 writing up the receipt for the repair, he apologized for having had to call for directions thirty minutes before he arrived. I carry maps but the work order didn’t even have your street address. It just had “HOUSE” and your phone number. The problem is that they’ve just switched our call center from India to Costa Rica. They’re still learning the procedures down there and they must be having trouble with addresses. The explanation was plausible—a call center that used operators who read scripts on computer screens moved to a source of even cheaper labor. In fact, however, the work order had not been taken by a human operator but by a computer using speech recognition software.

Competition, in turn, highlighted two principles: • Computerization accelerates the pace of job change. • Rapid job change raises the value of verbal and quantitative literacy. In response to competitive pressure, Mary’s employer sought to lower costs by consolidating small customer-service offices into large call centers. As in other competitive strategies, computers made the consolidation feasible. Large call centers justify their existence by serving cus- 102 CHAPTER 6 tomers in multiple states, and this increases both the variety of questions Mary receives and the complexity of the work needed to find the answers. Mary’s training has taught her to be good at translating customers’ questions into searchable queries.

While the software was not yet good enough to recognize the home address itself, it had captured enough information to print up a work order and append it to the technician’s schedule. In 1990 that work order would have been taken by an operator sitting somewhere in the United States. That operator’s job is now gone. Whether the job was displaced by a computer or a Costa Rican call center is unimportant for the moment. What is important is that the loss of the operator’s job is part of a much larger pattern. As recently as 1970, more than one-half of employed U.S. adults worked in two broad occupational categories: blue-collar jobs and clerical jobs (including the operator who would have written up the work order).


pages: 257 words: 76,785

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

Twenty-seven are creative agencies of various kinds: digital agencies; marketing, advertising, and PR firms; video production companies; design studios. Nine are in consulting, insurance, or financial services. Eight are in manufacturing or maintenance, ranging from a Japanese maker of rice mills to an auto repair center. Six make health and beauty products. Three are nursing homes, and three are call centers. Restaurants, creative agencies, and software firms are heavily represented because all three are dealing with systemic problems with mental health, stress, and burnout. The restaurant industry is one that’s long struggled with low pay, long hours, and difficult working conditions—and all too often, abusive behavior and sexism in the workplace.

While almost two-thirds of the companies in this book are from these three industries, the remaining third are quite varied. They include manufacturers of rice-milling machines and bespoke pressed-metal parts, organic cosmetics companies, nursing homes, an auto repair shop, insurance and financial companies, hotels, online and print publishers, and call centers. Two—Japanese e-commerce company Zozo and Korean O2O company Woowa Brothers—have over a thousand employees; most are much smaller, with under a hundred employees. Some shorten working hours by closing an extra day; others have maintained or even extended their opening hours while shortening workers’ shifts.

While they’re often motivated to move to shorter hours to attract new talent, many companies that successfully move to a four-day week are led by executive teams that already know how to work together. IIH Nordic cofounders Henrik Stenmann and Steen Rasmussen had previously worked together at digital marketing agency Deducta Search. The cofounders of Pursuit Marketing were all veterans of the Glasgow call-center world and worked together, and competed against each other, for years. Such teams are better able to deal with the challenges they’ll face when redesigning the workday, learning to work more intensively, and being more mindful about priorities and tasks. RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION External pressures also push companies to experiment with four-day weeks.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

A FRAMEWORK TO UNDERSTAND WHAT PEOPLE VALUE To illustrate, let us tell you a story about Ning.74 A native of China, he accepted a position as a strategy advisor at a large Australian enterprise after receiving his MBA. His assignment—to improve the lackluster performance of the organization’s call centers—was a challenge, because despite his seemingly lofty title, he had no formal authority over the call-center manager or agents, nor did he have much knowledge about what motivated their behavior and how to change it. One thing he did know, though: Morale at call centers is always a major issue. “Nobody ever calls in to say, ‘Hey, your service is working wonders, I love it!’ Callers are almost always angry,” he told us.75 “These agents hear people yell at them 24/7.

In just six months, their self-reported engagement, empowerment, autonomy, and satisfaction all went up by 27 percent. Management was equally thrilled, because the call-center’s productivity doubled! Ning’s approach was so successful that the company asked him to do his magic at every one of the country’s call centers. EARNING PEOPLE’S TRUST TO UNCOVER THEIR NEEDS Ning navigated his challenging circumstances beautifully. At first, he had the title but not the power to influence call-center employees. But by figuring out what they valued that he did have access to, and finding clever ways to deliver those resources, he gained the power he needed to create the change he aspired to.

But we find the same dynamic across industries. This is what Ning got so right. To overcome the suspicion of the call-center personnel, he used what social psychologists tell us are the most potent sources of interpersonal liking: familiarity (by plopping himself on the call-center floor right next to the other agents), and similarity (by showing that he and the agents had a lot more in common than met the eye).79 And he did so genuinely with a real desire to improve their working conditions. Once his benevolence was established and the call-center agents felt that they could confide in Ning, he was relentless in demonstrating his ability to act on his intentions, his competence.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

She was a former broker, having sold financial services for nearly two decades, much of that time with Washington Mutual, a savings and loan that catered to working class and middle class consumers. She’d moved up through the ranks and ended up managing teams of virtual financial advisors working out of call centers. WaMu went down in the 2007–2008 financial meltdown, but when JPMorgan Chase took the bank over in 2008, they kept Ceci on. At Chase, Ceci ended up training the offshore staff in countries like the Philippines that the bank was using to replace the workers still on its own payroll in US-based call centers. Eventually, in the spring of 2015, it was finally Ceci’s turn to get laid off. Coincidentally this was exactly at the same time that Bernie Sanders launched his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Through the campaign, so many amazing volunteers stepped up to bring their life skills and experience to play staff-equivalent roles on our team: videographers and graphic designers, social workers and restaurant workers, a director of a big-city human resources department, high school students, New Age healers and gritty retired steelworkers and disabled veterans, software developers, bankers, call center managers and, of course, nurses! We took a leap of faith and trusted the volunteers because we believed that was how the revolution should be built—and because we had no choice: Either we gave our supporters staff-equivalent positions, or we had no distributed campaign. Of course, there were moments when volunteers let us down—but if you’ve ever been a manager, you know that paid staff also sometimes let you down.

What made this even more of a break with the current orthodoxies that insist your campaign can only be as big as you have money to pay people was that this work was accomplished in large part by volunteers managed by other volunteers—no other presidential primary in recent history had done this. Volunteers weren’t only asked to call voters, they were also asked to run huge parts of the campaign’s digital organizing technology infrastructure, including our virtual call center and our peer-to-peer texting program. Some of them even opened rogue volunteer offices! Not all movements have such clear objectives and deadlines as electing a candidate to office—where your goal is to identify, persuade, and turnout more voters than your opponent, with Election Day as the ultimate deadline.


Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities by Thomas H. Davenport

Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cloud computing, commoditize, data acquisition, data science, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, recommendation engine, RFID, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sorting algorithm, statistical model, Tesla Model S, text mining, Thomas Davenport, three-martini lunch

Most of the executives we interviewed introduced big data tech­ nologies through an initial proof-of-concept approach to illustrate the high ­performance, lower cost of ownership, scale, and advanced business ­capabilities of big data solutions by applying them to current, often cumbersome, business processes. In some cases the proofs of concept showed the need for changes in other processes. At a major US airline, for example, analysis of call center speech-to-text data showed that customer interactions with call centers could be useful in predicting customer behavior, but also that call center processes needed some basic improvements that were more important than finer-grained predictive models. Other companies see the promise of big data to bring together disparate platform and processing functions that were previously fragmented and siloed.

In that industry—as well as several others, including retail—the big ­challenge Chapter_03.indd 67 03/12/13 11:28 AM 68 big data @ work is to understand multichannel customer relationships. They are using customer “journeys” through the tangle of websites, call centers, tellers, and other branch personnel to better understand the paths that customers follow through the organization, and how those paths affect attrition or the purchase of particular financial services. The data sources on multichannel customer journeys are unstructured or semistructured. They include website clicks, transaction records, bankers’ notes, and voice recordings from call centers. The volumes are quite large—12 billion rows of data for one of the banks. The firms are beginning to understand common journeys, describing them with segment names, ensuring that the customer interactions are high quality, and correlating journeys with customer opportunities and problems.

Banks The banking industry is already beginning to take advantage of the data it has on customer payments and financial activities, though there is plenty of room to grow with big data. Banking is now a multichannel activity, and some large banks are starting to understand the complex journeys customers make through call centers, branches, ATMs, and online websites to meet their financial needs. They are also beginning to customize marketing offers to customers. However, I have yet to find the bank that truly uses all of its customers’ ­financial data to make personalized and high-quality ­recommendations for financial products.


pages: 290 words: 90,057

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy by Lawrence Ingrassia

air freight, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, data science, fake news, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Hacker News, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork

It’s something people cared more about than the clothes themselves,” recalls Aaron Bata, who worked at Bonobos’s call center and went on to run customer service for the direct-to-consumer mattress start-up Tuft & Needle. “Every single one of us in that room was vastly overqualified to be a customer service rep. On one side of me was a woman who had just graduated from Princeton. On the other side was someone who had just graduated from Barnard.” Until 2014, Warby Parker’s call center team worked at its corporate headquarters in New York, which at one point was in the historic Puck Building in Lower Manhattan, which probably made it the most expensive call center office space in the world.

It was 2012, when the company was still small. But Mahoney had bought a pair of Warby Parker glasses and liked them, and he wanted to do something entrepreneurial. It was what most people would consider a lowly call center job. But Mahoney takes exception to that. “‘Call center’ is not at all how I would describe it,” he says. “We had a very customer-first mentality. That’s why I hate the ‘call center’ connotation. We had an expression: ‘to surprise and delight.’” He recalls a customer who lived in New York calling frantically on a Friday because the glasses she had ordered hadn’t been delivered on time, and she had been counting on wearing them to a wedding that weekend.

In 2019, about 350 of the company’s 2,000 employees worked on the CX team, making it the second-largest department after the retail store staff. Many American companies have outsourced their call centers overseas, often to India or the Philippines. For the customer, this can mean talking to someone with a hard-to-decipher accent who speaks English as a second language, but it saves the company money. By contrast, Warby Parker viewed its call center workers as critical to creating a bond with customers, because they were the first personal point of contact. “You call Warby Parker, and we want somebody to answer within six seconds.


pages: 316 words: 94,886

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

behavioural economics, billion-dollar mistake, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, loss aversion, Max Levchin, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, young professional

It’s like a guy kicking off a first date by declaring, “I should tell you up front that I’m broke and depressed; my belly roll strongly suggests a future as a diabetic; and, like an infant, my moods tend to vary directly with my digestion. Shall we head out to dinner?” The call center’s “warts and all” hiring approach is called a “realistic job preview.” Max Simkoff, the CEO of Evolv, the company that built the realistic job preview described above, said that many hiring professionals don’t understand the power of setting expectations. In a typical call center, Simkoff said, “there are seats that turn over three or four times a year. So then the call-center people immediately react: ‘We’re hiring the wrong people. We need to revisit our competency model.’ And we say, ‘No, you’re actually not doing a good job of explaining the job situation to the people that you hire.’ ” Realistic job previews have been proven, by a large research literature, to reduce turnover.

Because of this false sunniness, it can be difficult for both parties, employer and candidate alike, to get an accurate picture of the choice they’re making: “Can I tolerate this job?” “Can we tolerate this employee?” The cost of a mismatch is high. For entry-level jobs—call-center representatives, food-service workers, and so on—it’s not uncommon for annual turnover to be as high as 130%. This means that if a call center has 100 jobs, then the HR team would need to hire 130 people every single year to keep the positions filled. That constant rotation causes enormous waste for companies, who must recruit and train workers who end up leaving in a few weeks.

Consider a Web site that was created in 2011 to allow people to apply for a call-center position. It exposes applicants to a set of cautions and warnings: “You will interact with frustrated and demanding customers every day. You will be expected to provide superb customer service and be friendly under stressful conditions.” After reading some sobering information about compensation—“You will receive pay only for the time you spend taking customer calls!”—applicants are required to listen to an audio clip labeled “Sample Challenging Call,” taken from an actual call: CALL-CENTER REP: My name is Jose. May I have your first and last name, please?


pages: 317 words: 84,400

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

In 2000, Conway’s eLoyalty started losing business to larger consultancies with more expertise in moving some call center personnel offshore. As he looked for other ways to grow eLoyalty, Conway found few paths not already clogged with competitors. The business of call center software offered only small paths of growth that would have to be won inch by inch. The only way to leap far ahead of the pack would be to innovate, to create something that no other player could offer. The seed of NASA’s work had begun to bloom in Conway’s head. Along with the working of the space agency’s process, Conway knew two other things well: his own business of call center optimization and, as CEO of a Nasdaq company, the latest and greatest tricks being performed on Wall Street.

The psychiatrist considered Conway’s pitch and thought not only that it had merit but also that it could change the world of business and the practice of psychology. Inventing a product to change customer service could by itself prove immensely lucrative. The customer service industry is far larger than most people realize. AT&T, for instance, has 100,000 seats in its call centers and spends $4 billion a year to run them. The four million call center employees in the United States, in fact, represent the third-largest occupational category in the country. Inventing a better tool in this industry could be worth multiple billions of dollars every year. For years, constructing a bot that could quantify spoken words and determine personalities and thoughts was impossible.

Working with Telecom, Capers became close with Kelly Conway, who eventually rose to be CEO. The few years the two worked together were formative ones for Conway. He became engrossed with the theories and methods established at NASA for evaluating, reading, and predicting people. Conway eventually left Telecom to found eLoyalty, a consultancy for companies with large call centers, and he buried away in his head what he’d learned about assessing people. “I had a feeling it would someday become really useful,” Conway says. Conway’s eLoyalty grew and did well; it eventually went public and its stock was traded on the Nasdaq. But Conway didn’t forget about NASA or Capers.4 People’s core personalities rarely change.


pages: 271 words: 77,448

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

They were definitely the best relationship workers. PUTTING THE DISCOVERIES TO WORK Human interaction is so powerful that increasing it just a little improves group performance a lot. For example, Pentland and his lab investigated a huge Bank of America call center where the emphasis was on productivity; reducing the average call handle time at that one call center by just 5 percent would save the company $1 million a year. The bank grouped employees into teams of about twenty, but they didn’t interact much, in part because their work was entirely solitary, sitting in a cubicle with a phone and a computer.

Yet the members did interact a bit, and when Pentland asked them to wear the sociometric badges for six weeks, he found that the best predictor of team productivity was how much the members interacted in the little time they had, and what he calls engagement, the degree to which all team members were involved in the interaction. So Pentland proposed that managers try an experiment: Give a whole twenty-person team their coffee break at the same time. In a call center of over 3,000 employees, it was easy to shift others’ breaks to maintain service. The result was that group members interacted more, though it still wasn’t much; more of them were involved in the interaction; and productivity rocketed. The effects were so clear that the bank switched to team-based breaks at all its call centers, estimating the move would save $15 million a year. The same thing seems to happen everywhere. Even when people work mostly on their own, the right patterns of interaction when they do get together—as distinct from individuals’ personalities or anything else—are the main way groups get better.

Meg Bear, “Why Empathy Is the Critical 21st Century Skill,” posted at LinkedIn, 24 April 2014, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140424221331-1407199-why-empathy-is-the-critical-21st-century-skill. When Jim Bush was in charge of American Express’s call centers . . . Personal interview with Jim Bush, 29 March 2012. See also Jim Bush, “How American Express Transformed Its Call Centers,” HBR Blogs, 19 April 2011. Belinda Parmar, a U.K. technology commentator . . . Belinda Parmar, “Can Empathy Really Work in a Business World Dominated by Testosterone?” The Guardian, 18 June 2014. Columbia University business professor Rita McGrath . . .


pages: 204 words: 54,395

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, behavioural economics, call centre, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, deliberate practice, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional fixedness, game design, George Akerlof, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, side project, TED Talk, the built environment, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Then they follow that script, sometimes word for word, in the hope of getting the caller off the line as quickly as possible. It can be deadening work, made drearier still because managers in many call centers, in an effort to boost productivity, listen in on reps' conversations and monitor how long each call lasts. Little wonder, then, that call centers in the United States and the UK have annual turnover rates that average about 35 percent, double the rate for other jobs. In some call centers the annual turnover rate exceeds 100 percent, meaning that, on average, none of the people working there today will be there a year from now. Tony Hsieh, founder of the online shoe retailer (now part of ), thought there was a better way to recruit, prepare, and challenge such employees.

Technique When you call a customer service line to complain about your cable television bill or to check the whereabouts of that blender you ordered, the phone usually rings in a colorless cavern known as a call center. The person who answers the call, a customer service representative, has a tough job. He typically sits for hours among a warren of cramped cubicles headset strapped on, a diet soda by his side. The pay is paltry. And the people the rep encounters on the phone one after another after another generally aren't ringing up to offer kudos or to ask about the rep's weekend plans. They've got a gripe, a frustration, or a problem that needs solving. Right. Now. If that weren't trying enough, call center reps have little decision latitude and their jobs are often the very definition of routine.

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (New York: Portfolio, 2008). Tamara J. Erickson, Task, Not Time: Profile of a Gen Y Job, Harvard Business Review (February 2008): 19. Diane Brady and Jena McGregor, Customer Service Champs, BusinessWeek , March 2, 2009. Martha Frase-Blunt, Call Centers Come Home, HR Magazine 52 ( January 2007): 84; Ann Bednarz, Call Centers Are Heading for Home, Network World , January 30, 2006. Paul Restuccia, What Will Jobs of the Future Be? Creativity, Self-Direction Valued, Boston Herald , February 12, 2007. Gary Hamel, The Future of Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007).


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

You’ll need five days to complete the whole route; the northeast England section, from Penrith (in Cumbria) to the east coast is a good three-day trip. If you wanted to cut the urban sections, Penrith to Consett is perfect in a weekend. The C2C is aimed at road bikes, but there are several optional off-road sections. * * * CALL THE NORTHEAST The northeast is the call-centre capital of England, mostly because the area desperately needed to attract jobs to the region following the demise of traditional industry. But another reason might have to do with the distinctive accent, which polls have shown to be the friendliest and most trustworthy of all English accents! * * * The other option is the Hadrian’s Cycleway (Click here in Cumbria.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

—TERRY GOU, FOUNDER OF FOXCONN INTRODUCTION THE GREAT DISPLACEMENT I am writing from inside the tech bubble to let you know that we are coming for your jobs. I recently met a pair of old friends for drinks in Manhattan. One is an executive who works at a software company in New York. They replace call center workers with artificial intelligence software. I asked her whether she believed her work would result in job losses. She responded matter-of-factly, “We are getting better and better at things that will make large numbers of workers extraneous. And we will succeed. There needs to be a dramatic reskilling of the workforce, but that’s not going to be practical for a lot of people.

GE, my dad’s old company and once a beacon of manufacturing, became the fifth biggest financial institution in the country by 2007. With improved technology and new access to global markets, American companies realized they could outsource manufacturing, information technology, and customer service to Chinese and Mexican factories and Indian programmers and call centers. U.S. companies outsourced and offshored 14 million jobs by 2013, many of which would have previously been filled by domestic workers at higher wages. This resulted in lower prices, higher efficiencies, and some new opportunities but also increased pressures on American workers who now had to compete with a global labor pool.

Many of the settings for these jobs are large corporates that, during the next downturn, will replace headcount with a combination of software, bots, and AI. Consider that 2.5 million of the jobs in the clerical and administrative category are customer service representatives. They are typically high school graduates making $15.53 an hour or $32,000 a year in call centers. We’ve all had crummy experiences with voice recognition software and pounded our phone keys until we got a human on the line. But the AI experience is about to improve to a point where we’re not going to be able to tell the difference. Several companies right now employ a hybrid approach where voice recordings are combined with a human in the Philippines tapping buttons so that a Filipino can “call” you but you think you’re talking to a native speaker because you’re hearing a prerecorded voice.


pages: 252 words: 72,473

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

Big Data has also been used to study the productivity of call center workers. A few years ago, MIT researchers analyzed the behavior of call center employees for Bank of America to find out why some teams were more productive than others. They hung a so-called sociometric badge around each employee’s neck. The electronics in these badges tracked the employees’ location and also measured, every sixteen milliseconds, their tone of voice and gestures. It recorded when people were looking at each other and how much each person talked, listened, and interrupted. Four teams of call center employees—eighty people in total—wore these badges for six weeks.

Talking was discouraged because workers were supposed to spend as many of their minutes as possible on the phone, solving customers’ problems. Coffee breaks were scheduled one by one. The researchers found, to their surprise, that the fastest and most efficient call center team was also the most social. These employees pooh-poohed the rules and gabbed much more than the others. And when all of the employees were encouraged to socialize more, call center productivity soared. But data studies that track employees’ behavior can also be used to cull a workforce. As the 2008 recession ripped through the economy, HR officials in the tech sector started to look at those Cataphora charts with a new purpose.

Replacing a worker earning $50,000 a year costs a company about $10,000, or 20 percent of that worker’s yearly pay, according to the Center for American Progress. Replacing a high-level employee can cost multiples of that—as much as two years of salary. Naturally, many hiring models attempt to calculate the likelihood that each job candidate will stick around. Evolv, Inc., now a part of Cornerstone OnDemand, helped Xerox scout out prospects for its calling center, which employs more than forty thousand people. The churn model took into account some of the metrics you might expect, including the average time people stuck around on previous jobs. But they also found some intriguing correlations. People the system classified as “creative types” tended to stay longer at the job, while those who scored high on “inquisitiveness” were more likely to set their questioning minds toward other opportunities.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

One of the European managers we interviewed was worried about the level of racism that remained in assuming that Indian university graduates would be happy working in a call center if it was for a European or American company. “The top talent can compete on a global stage; we’ve already proved that, but you can’t expect these people to go and work in a call center. But some people seem to believe that is going to happen; it’s bizarre . . . this is just racism parading by some other name. They are going to be really grateful for the chance to work in a call center.” A Chinese banking executive also told us that an ethnic hierarchy worked in his bank because there was widespread resentment of a glass ceiling for local Chinese employees, as all the talent that had been fast tracked appeared to come from Western countries.

Within a major American bank, there was no strategy to shift jobs to India from New York or elsewhere within the group, but a discussion between senior staff in Mumbai and sponsors in New York led to a “handshake for a few operations jobs.” This was in 2002, when the company began engaging in a number of pilot projects in response to increasing cost pressures. The experiment with back-office functions reflected the growth in offshore call centers and business process outsourcing (BPO). There was little point using staff in New York or London to process invoices or very basic data-entry jobs when it could be done in real time in India or Vietnam at a fraction of the price. Although the company was in the early stages of developing wealth management and investment banking within the country, there was rapid growth of the middle office that includes research and analytical jobs for its New York and London offices.

Her senior colleague added that what was really different was the quality of the research they were generating for the front line to use—that is those who actually negotiate the deals with clients. “These are the areas that we find that talent is delivering to an even higher standard than expected. We’re not doing those menial call center type jobs. It’s global work and that’s where we think we’ve been able to add a lot more value than what was initially expected and that will continue.” Quality: From Local Adaptation to Global Markets We have already seen how Western companies have played a key role in the transfer of knowledge in China and India.


pages: 520 words: 134,627

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

* * * • • • SINGER’S RESULTS-ORIENTED APPROACH earned him a good reputation in the call-center industry and he was recruited for a new post. He returned with his family to Sacramento in 2002 and took a job as CEO of a different company’s overseas call center. Owned by FirstRing India, it had more than five hundred employees and attracted money from a venture capital fund that was bringing in new leadership, including a new CEO, Singer, to improve performance. Outsourcing had soared, and the call center, in a building outside Bangalore, ran round-the-clock shifts. Workers in cubicles with soundproofed walls made outbound sales calls for Discover Card and answered calls for companies ranging from American Express to ADT Inc.

Workers in cubicles with soundproofed walls made outbound sales calls for Discover Card and answered calls for companies ranging from American Express to ADT Inc. Prab Singh, an easygoing U.S.-raised Sikh with a turban and beard, was helping to manage the center when he learned Singer would be his new boss. Though the call center was set in a modern technology park, leading a business in the fast-growing but poor country came with operational obstacles. No public transportation went to the call center, so managers ran vans back and forth to Bangalore between shifts. The roads were bad and the vans were constantly breaking down, preventing people from getting to work. Sometimes comical cultural challenges abounded.

Singer was making a career change himself. He told Hamilton he’d been offered a job with the Money Store, a national subprime lender based in Sacramento. Singer landed the position after doing college counseling for the children of management at the company. He would be handling recruitment and training at a call center and seemed excited. He’d make more money and work regular daytime hours. Hamilton took over Singer’s database and hauled away boxes of Singer’s college brochures. Singer was busy, already working at the Money Store while wrapping up applications for counseling clients. Allison was sentimental about leaving the business, but it was different for her husband, she told Hamilton.


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

When there was enough work to do, Gary was obligated to work at least 30 hours per week. When there was not enough work to do, he might only be able to get 10 or 20 hours worth of work. He never knew when hours would be available, which meant that he couldn’t commit to another job outside of the call center. In July, when he’d first started the remote call center job, this hadn’t seemed like a problem. Because he took calls about broken air conditioners, there was more than enough work to do during the summer heat. When he couldn’t work 30 hours or didn’t want to, he had to let his boss know in advance so that his absence wouldn’t impact his rating as a contractor.

For a half hour here, a half hour there, to try to collect extra hours.” During the month he spent training without pay, Gary hadn’t been able to pay his bills. Now he didn’t have any savings to fill in the gaps between periods when he could get work with the call center. Whatever happened, Gary knew that some had it worse. He’d kept in touch with a few of the other call center workers who had been in his virtual training course. Some told him they were being paid $3 or $4 per hour, which meant their managers—most likely also contractors—were keeping a large percentage of their wages for themselves. It wasn’t as though an employment relationship would necessarily have prevented wage theft.

The Big Brother website did not make enough money to live on, and though Kristy was about to sell it for a modest sum (a wise move, considering that Twitter and Facebook were about to take over as platforms on which strangers discussed television shows), it wouldn’t be the kind of sale that could support a family. Kristy had closed her daycare when she moved into a new neighborhood. And selling garage sale finds on eBay wasn’t going to cut it. In the few customer service jobs Kristy had taken at call centers years earlier, she had not enjoyed working under someone else’s rules. Slowly, this preference for working at home had turned into a lack of experience working outside of the home. She hadn’t waited on tables, had no experience in fast food, and had not learned any skills that might be particularly useful in a factory.


pages: 359 words: 97,415

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together by Andrew Selee

Berlin Wall, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, public intellectual, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Wozniak, work culture , Y Combinator

And Mexico has huge comparative advantages: people like Pinzón speak American English, they live in the same time zone, and they can also serve Spanish-speaking clients in the United States. Tens of thousands of Mexicans now work in call centers—perhaps over 100,000—which is still below the numbers in India and the Philippines but gaining quickly. “Any area around a call center will have burritos,” says Pinzón, turning back to the subject of food. In Mexico City, tacos with homemade corn tortillas, cilantro, onion, and salsa are the quintessential on-the-go lunch food. But people who grew up in the States prefer burritos made of wheat tortillas—the heart of Tex-Mex cuisine.

Within a couple blocks of TeleTech, five or six restaurants now serve burritos to attract workers from the call center. That’s one way you can pick TeleTech workers out of the crowds eating in the small restaurants in this busy part of Mexico City. The other way is that they speak English to each other. Pinzón, who went through the sixth grade in Mexico, speaks fluent Spanish, but she prefers English and says most of her friends do too. She met most of them through the networks of young people who work in call centers; that is also how she met her husband, Chris Chirinos. He speaks Spanish with a marked American accent, having spent most his life in California.

Frustrated, she finally decided to return to Mexico City, the metropolis in which she had been born eighteen years earlier. “I miss the small towns,” she says wistfully, as a truck rolls by in the distance near her home in Mexico City. After moving back, Pinzón found work with TeleTech, one of several large call centers in Mexico that hire young people who have grown up in the United States to provide service to cable companies, credit card providers, and other corporate clients. Companies like TeleTech used to set up centers mostly in India because of the availability of English-speaking workers, but they have now started tapping Mexico and its growing pool of native English speakers like Pinzón.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Those who did were usually employed at the lower rungs of the information economy.20 They found service-sector jobs at the ticketing counter of the Delhi metro, at lower-end call centers, at customer service positions in malls, as entry-level data operators for government programs like the unique identification number (UID) project, and at airline and tourism counters. Graduates who were employed at the metro ticketing counters and call centers visited the center to talk to the students about the pleasures of working in a clean, air-conditioned environment and wearing stylish clothes such as well-fitted shirts or short kurtas.

Through the studies of platforms and infrastructure, bitcoin mining, programming languages, underground cable networks, and much more, this volume drives home what is often termed the “materiality of the digital”—that is, the physicality of computational and new media technologies that are too often described in ethereal terms. Computing and new media depend upon flesh-and-bone metabolism. Our “virtual worlds” are made possible by battalions of human beings (as well as nonhuman organisms): cable layers, miners, e-waste recyclers, content moderators, call-center operators, data-entry technicians, and repair technicians, many of whom come from marginalized class, racial, and gendered positions. Computing and new media run on a vast metabolic conflagration. In certain cases, the work of fabricating so-called virtual experiences exposes laborers to a daily regimen of toxic by-products of electronics manufacturing and disposal and, in other cases, to forms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that grow out of long working days spent concentrating on realms of the digital world that the rest of us rely upon them to keep out of view: still-frame and live-action portrayals of extreme violence, child pornography, and vicious or hateful speech.

In the early years of Sears customer service workers would not only have to enter customer correspondence data into a form that could be processed by the information systems that the company used to manage its internal databases but would also then copy their responses by hand as a means of establishing a more personal relationship to their otherwise unknown and invisible consumers. A century later Amazon would solve the same problem using human call center operators, many of them originally hired out of local Seattle-area coffee shops in order to provide a more recognizably “authentic” interaction.28 Even in the era of online feedback and user ratings, the human element required to establish and maintain trust remains a necessary—and extremely expensive—component of even the most highly automated high-tech operations.29 Amazon was notorious in its early years for the ruthless efficiency with which it ran its customer service operations.


pages: 372 words: 89,876

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

That would be great for you though, right? Because the cost of serving someone else’s customer is zero! Yay for the cost savings team! Then, when your customer tells all her friends about her experience, you will lose more customers. Your call center costs will continue to go down. At some point, when the last customer has left, you can eliminate your call center altogether. Total cost victory achieved. Cost and Quality are Not Mutually Exclusive Once you’re making a profit at something, and you feel like you’ve got as many people buying it as are happy to buy it (market saturation), the next move is to try and to cut costs.

Not a good recipe for customer satisfaction or long-term business growth. The real world throws a lot of variety at you. It’s bound to throw things at you that you didn’t prepare for, plan for, or anticipate. In most cases, service providers must reorganize to absorb variety rather than reduce or contain it. Online shoe store Zappos’ call centers are designed to absorb variety. Most call centers look at customer support as a cost. After all, if you have already been paid for a product and delivered it, then you already have your money and any additional effort on your part will only cost you money, right? Zappos looks at the equation differently. Zappos knows that a customer call probably represents a very tiny fraction of their total interactions with the company.

Ron Johnson, who joined Apple from Target to launch Apple Retail, started asking people about the best service experiences they had ever had. The majority of people spoke of hotel experiences. So Apple patterned its stores on the hotel experience, including a bar—the Genius Bar. “Instead of dispensing alcohol, we dispense advice,” says Johnson. While most companies are moving customer support to overseas call centers, Apple is bringing real face-to-face support to your neighborhood. In the early stages, Apple recruited managers from the hospitality industry, most notably from service leader Ritz-Carlton. Each manager spent a week in Cupertino for specialized training. Managers were steeped in the Apple philosophy of service.


pages: 426 words: 105,423

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, call centre, clean water, digital nomad, Donald Trump, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fixed income, follow your passion, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, global village, Iridium satellite, knowledge worker, language acquisition, late fees, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, oil shock, paper trading, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

I am more like a police officer on the side of the road who can step in if need be, and I use detailed reports from outsourcers to ensure the cogs are moving as intended. I check reports from fulfillment each Monday and monthly reports from the same the first of each month. The latter reports include orders received from the call center, which I can compare to the call center bills to gauge profit. Otherwise, I just check bank accounts online on the first and fifteenth of each month to look for odd deductions. If I find something, one e-mail will fix it, and if not, it’s back to kendo, painting, hiking, or whatever I happen to be doing at the time.

Interview them about costs and ask them for referrals to call centers and credit card processors they’ve collaborated with for file transfers and problem solving. Don’t assemble an architecture of strangers—there will be programming costs and mistakes, both of which are expensive. Set up an account with the credit card processor first, for which you will need your own merchant account. This is critical, as the fulfillment house can only handle refunds and declined cards for transactions they process themselves through an outsourced credit card processor. Optionally, set up an account with one of the call centers your new fulfillment center recommends.

CD/DVD Duplication, Printing, and Product Packaging AVC Corporation (www.avccorp.com) SF Video (www.sfvideo.com) Local Fulfillment (fewer than 20 units shipped per week) Mailing Fulfillment Service Association (www.mfsanet.org) End-to-End Fulfillment Companies (more than 20 units shipped per week, $500+ setup) Motivational Fulfillment (www.mfpsinc.com) The secret backend to campaigns from HBO, PBS, Comic Relief, Body by Jake, and more. Innotrac (www.innotrac.com) They are currently one of the largest DR marking companies. Moulton Fulfillment (www.moultonfulfillment.com) 200,000-square-foot facility with real-time online inventory reports. Call Centers (per-minute and/or per-sale fees) There are generally two classes of call centers: order takers and commissioned reps. Interview each provider you consider to understand the options and costs involved. The former is a good option if you give the product price in an advertisement (hard offer), are offering free information (lead generation), or don’t need trained salespeople who can overcome objections.


pages: 280 words: 82,355

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio

Airbnb, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, work culture

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh suggested, half in jest, that they call the Zappos 800 number for ordering shoes. He said they should, without telling the Zappos call-center employee who they were, ask for help in finding a pizzeria that would deliver to the hotel. Hsieh made a bet that the Zappos call-center employee would help because his firm is dedicated to serving others—regardless of the request. One of the Sketchers people took the CEO up on his boast and made the call, with others in the group listening in on the speakerphone. The Zappos call-center employee was initially confused as to how to respond. But, as Hsieh predicted, she then helped locate the desired pizza.

The company, for example, trains team members on how to fully engage callers, with the goal of meeting their needs whenever possible. It wants each caller to Zappos to leave the interaction happier. The company does not use efficiency metrics (number of calls per hour) to reward its call-center employees. Nor does it promote “upselling,” where callers are encouraged to buy more products beyond their initial purchase. Zappos likes to publicize that some customers stay on the line with its call-center reps for hours at a time (with a recent call breaking the firm’s previous record in lasting 10 hours and 43 minutes). Paying its employees to stay on the phone for hours is hard to justify from a profit perspective—yet that is what Zappos does.

For example, Zappos places great emphasis on customer service and, more generally, customer happiness (what it calls WOW). The company tracks a variety of statistics such as the number of calls handled, which its call-center people see every day. However, Zappos doesn’t set targets on call time or upsell revenue. The key metric is what the company calls the Personal Emotional Connection. This is assessed several times a week by staff who listen in on calls and assess the effectiveness of call-center members. Their ratings are shared with each person and improvement areas are discussed. Another key metric is what it calls a Net Promoter Score. This metric compares the number of people, as assessed by a follow-up survey, who recommend or promote Zappos to others versus those who are detractors of the company.


pages: 250 words: 83,367

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

Alfred Russel Wallace, call centre, crack epidemic, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Multics, trade route, union organizing

And so it seemed only fitting that the key to Murphy’s economic stimulus plan was the Industrial Park, kitty-corner from the Sportsmen’s, where in March 2006 a gridded road system already cut the acreage into blocks. Among the weeds sprouting up now that the farmer who once leased those 250 acres was no longer spraying herbicide, a sign read “Oelwein Industrial Park—Come Grow with Us!” Murphy said the city had been courting a call center to lease the space, but it had two competitors: a similar-sized town in Nebraska and a town near Mumbai, India. If the call center prospect fell through, there were bound to be other options, said Murphy. It just wasn’t entirely clear what they might be, or when they’d make themselves available. Meanwhile, things in Oelwein were growing more desperate every month.

Some real treatment alternatives might help Oelwein nip drug abuse in the bud, rather than simply treating its symptoms—even as those symptoms gained ineluctable momentum. For now, though, that was all a pipe dream. There was no excess revenue for anything, never mind treatment. Murphy’s task was to raise the town from the ashes. He had to build a foundation of decent economic growth, and he had to do it ASAP. Businesses like the call center could afford to be choosy—every hard-luck town in the United States was courting them. In fact, Murphy believed that most companies were looking for a certain modicum of poverty as a fail-safe against union organizing. If people were desperate, they’d concede this essential ground to the company.

Compared with this, his past battles as a liberal pro-lifer had been a cakewalk. During 2004 and 2005, Murphy had done everything possible to run the small-lab meth business out of town as a means of preparing Oelwein to rebuild. This was not just to compete with the towns in India or Nebraska that might lure the likes of the call center. It was to compete with Oelwein’s more immediate neighbors. Nathan had told me, along with several other people, that DHS workers in nearby Buchanan County—home of pretty, prosperous little Independence—had for years been recommending that their worst cases move to Fayette County, and particularly to Oelwein, where taxes were low and the rental market was burgeoning.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Precisely that kind of work and those kind of working conditions are becoming more common. Think of people who get relegated to work in gig-economy jobs. Or people who fulfill orders in Amazon warehouses, racing around picking boxes off shelves, too busy to take bathroom breaks. Or the thousands of people living lives of quiet desperation in call centers—monitored, measured, and managed by machines. Some call center workers rarely interact with an actual human manager, and usually it is only to be rebuked because the performance-monitoring software has “reported” them for doing something wrong. Even for ordinary white-collar workers, the modern workplace abounds with dehumanizing policies and practices, some trivial, some more profound.

Where to begin with such overweening self-regard? First of all, this is Netflix. They make some TV shows and provide streaming movies over the Internet. They’re not putting a man on the moon or tinkering with the human genome to find a cure for cancer. Second, the company has nearly five thousand employees, and many are customer support call center reps, some of whom make as little as $14 an hour. These are not professional basketballers earning millions of dollars a year or members of the Olympic ice hockey team. For the record, professional sports teams do not, in fact, have stars in every position. Moreover, the best pro sports teams succeed exactly because the players feel like a family.

On Glassdoor, a website where employees anonymously rate employers, Netflix garners a score of 3.7 out of 5. That’s lower than Google, Apple, and Facebook, even lower than Ford Motor Company, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and ExxonMobil. The desk jockeys at Netflix complain about a bruising environment with high turnover and rapid burnout. One call center worker wrote on Glassdoor: “Everything, from the time you spent in the restroom, to the time you spent on a certain type of call, is broken down to the second and charted. Honestly the most hostile environment I’ve ever been in.” To be sure, some happy Netflix employees rave about the company. But the gripes like these stand out: “The amount of people who got fired for the FIRST THREE WEEKS I was there was unbelievable.”


Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

As more and more work is done by robots and AI, more and more of our economy’s value is generated by things other than people. We are facing a situation in which there will be fewer and fewer human workers capable of paying income taxes over time. Take the example of Google’s AI doing the work of call center workers, which was announced in mid-2020. How much will Google pay in taxes? Certainly much less than the more than two million Americans working in call centers right now making between $10 and $15 an hour. The same will be true of self-driving trucks and the more than three million Americans who currently drive a truck for a living. If we truly want to use our economic prosperity to build a stronger country, we need to harvest these kinds of productivity gains in order to fund real changes.

Four million manufacturing jobs had been eliminated in recent years, and I realized that what I saw in the Midwest and the South was the new normal. And even that normal was going to get ground to dust by future and impending waves of automation and technology that were going to overrun communities until there was nothing left. What happened to those millions of manufacturing jobs would soon happen to retail jobs, call center jobs, trucking jobs, and on and on through the economy. Both my time in these communities and the data were saying the same thing. The tide was coming in, and more and more people were going to get swept away. And then Trump won. Imagine being someone who had spent six years helping create hundreds of jobs in the Midwest and the South—and getting awards for it—and realizing that your work was like pouring water in a bathtub that had a giant hole ripped in the bottom of it and the water rushing out had helped elect Donald Trump.

I’m running for President as a Democrat in 2020 because I believe we must start having honest conversations about and formulate real solutions to the growing impact of technological unemployment/automation that has already displaced millions of Americans and will soon affect millions more. The elimination of 4 million manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other midwestern states gave us Donald Trump. The displacement of retail workers, truck drivers, fast food workers, call center workers, etc. will strain our society beyond repair. The simple truth is that our technology is advancing faster than our labor market can adapt. The most immediate and vital step is to implement a Universal Basic Income (“the Freedom Dividend”) of $12k/year for all adults. This will serve as an economic and social support for the transition and preserve our consumer market while we shift to a new economy.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

Fenugreek is a versatile spice used in many cuisines around the world, but in American supermarkets it is most commonly found in the products on one shelf—the one where they sell cheap maple syrup substitutes. — Fourteen months after the maple syrup mystery was solved, Mayor Michael Bloomberg paid a visit to the 311 call center, which is housed in a city building in the warrens of downtown Manhattan, just a few blocks east of Ground Zero. With its high ceilings, playful Flor tiles underfoot, and dual LCD monitors on every desk, the main call center room feels a lot like a Web start-up, until one registers the steady murmur of the fifty “customer service professionals” working the phones. Mounted on one wall is an oversize dashboard, with chunky blue, red, and green LED pixels tallying the day’s inflows by city department: calls waiting, maximum waiting time, agents on call—and the most important statistic of all, service level, which reports the percentage of calls that are answered within thirty seconds.

Done well, they can even outperform the market. Several years after the launch of 311, New York City commissioned a third-party firm to compare the customer satisfaction of 311 users with that of users of other call centers in both the public and private sectors. The 311 customer satisfaction ratings came out on top, barely edging out hotel and retail experiences but beating other government call centers, such as the IRS’s, by a mile. (At the very bottom of the list, not surprisingly, cable companies.) Extracting information from, or reporting problems to, a government agency is traditionally a recipe for psychic pain, because bureaucracies are so incompetent at addressing individual needs.

Launched in March 2003, 311 now fields on average more than 50,000 calls a day, offering callers information about more than 3,000 services: school closings, recycling rules, homeless shelters, park events, pothole repairs. The service has translators on call to support 180 different languages. Since its launch, 311 operators in New York have fielded more than 100 million calls. Having those 311 call centers in place offered the city a direct medium with which to communicate with citizens worried about the strange breakfast smells saturating their neighborhoods. During “maple syrup events,” as city officials came to call them, 311 operators were instructed to explain to callers that the smell was harmless, and that they should go about their business as usual.


pages: 268 words: 75,850

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

And it was all built on personalization. Please Hold to Be Connected to Our Algorithm It is well known that not every call-center agent is equipped to handle every type of call that comes in. The larger the company, the less likely it is that any one person will be able to deal with every single inquiry, which is the reason customers are typically routed to different departments in which agents are trained to have different skills and knowledge bases. A straightforward example might be the global company whose call centers regularly receive calls in several different languages. Both callers and agents may speak one or more of several possible languages, but not necessarily all of them.

When the French-speaking customer phones up, they may be advised to press “1” on their keypad, while the English-speaking customer might be instructed to press “2.” They are then routed through to the person best suited to deal with their call. But what if—instead of simply redirecting customers to different call-center agents based upon language or specialist knowledge—an algorithm could be used to determine particular qualities of the person calling in: based upon speech patterns, the particular words they used, and even details as seemingly trivial as whether they said “um” or “err”—and then utilize these insights to put them through to the agent best suited for dealing with their emotional needs?

If people’s communication needs are not met by being given the kind of positive “feedback” they require (a feelings-oriented person being asked cold hard facts, for example) they go into distress, which can be diffused only if the person on the other end of the conversation is able to adequately pick up on the warning signals and respond appropriately. In a call-center environment this knowledge results in an extraordinary qualitative change, according to Mattersight. A person patched through to an individual with a similar personality type to their own will have an average conversation length of five minutes, with a 92 percent problem-resolution rate. A caller paired up to a conflicting personality type, on the other hand, will see their call length double to ten minutes—while the problem-resolution rate tumbles to 47 percent.


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

So many companies yearn for more innovation and creativity, but they don’t take the very first critical step—thinking of their employees as artists. Purpose-Powered The University of Pennsylvania’s Adam Grant did a very simple but powerful experiment with university fundraising call center employees. He broke them into three random groups. The first was read stories from previous call center employees about how the job had helped them develop their sales skills. The second set was told stories about how alumni had benefited from the donations raised by the call center. The third, the control group, had unrelated stories read to them. He replicated the study five times and found the same results. Those who were read the second story, the one about purpose, more than doubled the dollars raised.

Caring for others means engaging with others, and for many doing dirty work, they are expected to be nearly invisible within an organization. This doesn’t just apply to sanitation workers or morticians. It also applies to roles like working in a call center. I met with a member of the management team of a major telecommunications company, who openly talked about how the company views their call center employees as “sub-human.” In this case, the researchers were interested in the maintenance staff at a hospital, the folks who clean up after the sick, dying, and recently deceased. It is a dirty job, but in the context of a high-caring enterprise.

After joining Google, Arthur found the reality to be very different. Like all companies with thousands of employees, Google struggled to fully enable their youngest hires with meaningful opportunities and roles within the organization. Though Arthur was sitting in the heart of Google in Silicon Valley, he could have just as easily been in a call center for a utility company in any anonymous office park. The job consisted of 30 hours per week of mainly rote roles. The remaining hours were spent in meetings talking about the rote tasks; there was little creative freedom or clear purpose to the work. The only difference was that his peers were also over-achievers and brilliant individuals who shared his vision of Google when they had started.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

In many countries, services are the fastest-growing part of the economy, reflecting rapid growth in cell phone services, hotels, restaurants, construction, call centers, financial services, and other activities. Across all developing countries, output in services has been increasing by more than 5 percent per year since 1995, so that the total value of services (in real terms after accounting for inflation) has increased 150 percent. In some countries, there is a particularly important shift toward more modern services such as software development, technical services (engineering and architecture), outsourced business processes (from insurance claims to transcribing medical records), and call centers, all of which create jobs and increase skills over time.

Similarly, Jenny Aker of Tufts University found that mobile phones reduced price variations in grain markets in Niger by a minimum of 6.4 percent, and even more in remote markets, which contributed to both lower consumer prices and higher profits for farmers.31 And, of course, alongside mobile phones, increased internet connectivity has created new economic opportunities and transformed lives across developing countries—at least where it has reached so far. Call centers in the Philippines provide travel services, technical support to computer users, customer care services, and financial services to consumers around the world. There are now more than a thousand call centers in the Philippines, creating several hundred thousand jobs for semiskilled workers that didn’t exist before. Data entry firms have sprouted up in Kenya, Ghana, Bangladesh, India, Colombia, Brazil, and dozens of other countries.

Advances in technology and much deeper global connectivity have allowed developing countries to provide services to other countries as never before: developing countries accounted for 14 percent of global service exports in 1990; two decades later, the share had jumped to 21 percent. Indian software companies are the most famous example, but they are not alone. Sri Lankan engineers are working with firms around the world, South African banks are spreading across the rest of the continent, call centers in Belize are answering billing questions for American cell phone users, companies in the Philippines are transcribing insurance and medical records, and Kenyan accounting firms are providing services to their neighbors. Manufacturing and industry have expanded just as fast, with growth exceeding 5 percent per year.


pages: 289 words: 99,936

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

The low wages, combined with the insecurity of the employment relationship in the high-tech sector and the physical and mental strains of the jobs, likely influence the extreme volatility and fast employee turnover in low-wage high-tech employment. For example, Cathy Reynolds was offered a promotion to supervisor after four months at an insurance claims company because of her seniority; only three other people had been at the company longer. Call center and data entry work are sites of intense technologicallymediated surveillance, as the experience of women in the YWCA community amply illustrated. Work processes in call center and data entry Drowning in the Sink-or-Swim Economy 73 occupations are highly visible. Efficiency is measured and displayed constantly: employers track the number of bids entered or calls answered at the bottom of employees’ computer screens, and check the numbers several times a day to monitor their progress.

But the majority of women I interviewed in the YWCA community talked about a different kind of experience with technology altogether, an experience marked not by technology lack or deficiency but by technological ubiquity. They described their extensive use of computers in the lowwage workforce—about half of the women I interviewed had been data entry or call center workers. Others talked about encountering computers in the social service system. They described welfare caseworkers who blocked eye contact by hiding behind a computer terminal. They described 10 Chapter 1 their feelings of hopelessness and frustration when caseworkers couldn’t find their information in “the system,” a feeling intensified by the computer’s apparent power to decide their family’s fate.

In interviews and public events, many have said that they think “computers are the future,” and have conceded that technological skills are something they should have to remain competitive in the job market. But they also directly experience the more exploitative face of IT as workers in low-wage, high-tech occupations such as data entry and call centers, as clients of increasingly computerized government services, and as citizens surveyed by technologies in public institutions and spaces. It is not so much that they lack access to technology but that their everyday experiences with it can be invasive, intrusive, and extractive. As I began this research, my overreliance on access-based models of high-tech equity and my privileged class and racial position led me to overlook—and even obscure—poor and working-class women’s extensive interaction with information systems.


pages: 85 words: 15,113

Asterisk Cookbook by Leif Madsen, Russell Bryant

call centre

Audio Manipulation Introduction The recipes in this chapter are designed to help you with the injection of audio into and the monitoring of channels in your Asterisk environment. Many of the recipes focus on a particular aspect but can be built up or modified using the skills learned in other recipes in this book. Monitoring and Barging into Live Calls Problem As the manager of a call center, you need to be able to listen in on calls to help with training new employees. Solution The most simple solution is to simply connect to any active channel using the ChanSpy() application, which then provides you the ability to flip through active channels using DTMF. The b option means to only listen to actively bridged calls: [CallCenterTraining] exten => 500,1,Verbose(2,Listening to live agents) same => n,ChanSpy(,b) If you only want to spy on certain channels, you can use the chanprefix option to control which types of channels you want to listen to.

With some creativity, ChanSpy() can be used in many situations it wasn’t necessarily designed for (see Triggering Audio Playback into a Call Using DTMF). Not only can ChanSpy() be used to listen to the conversation between channels, but you can also speak to a single channel where only one person can hear you, referred to as whispering. Whispering to a channel is commonplace in situations where a manager of a call center is training an employee, and needs to listen to an agent during the call. To enable whispering to channels that are being spied on, use the w option: [CallCenterTraining] exten => 500,1,Verbose(2,Listening to live agents with whisper) same => n,ChanSpy(,bw) Of course, we’re going to be looking for some finer grain control for who we’re listening to.

About the Authors Leif Madsen first got involved with the Asterisk community when he was looking for a voice conferencing solution. Once he learned that there was no official Asterisk documentation, he co-founded the Asterisk Documentation Project. Leif is currently working as a consultant, specializing in Asterisk clustering and call-center integration. You can get more information at http://www.leifmadsen.com. Russell Bryant is the Engineering Manager for the Open Source Software team at Digium, Inc. He has been a core member of the Asterisk development team since the Fall of 2004. At the first AstriCon in 2004, he was named the release maintainer for Asterisk's first major release series, Asterisk 1.0.


pages: 204 words: 58,565

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

An Informed Consumer of Analytics There are many ways that managers, working closely with the quantitative analysts in their organizations, can use analytics to enhance their decisions. Let’s take a recent decision that Jennifer Joy made at Cigna—a leading health service company. Joy is vice president of Clinical Operations, and she runs a large call center for the company. The call center works with Cigna’s customers to improve their health and wellness, particularly if they have a chronic condition, such as diabetes or heart disease, that requires ongoing treatment. Jen is a nurse by background, not an analyst. But she has an MBA and is a believer in the importance of analytical thinking.

Cousins pointed out, “It took some courage on her part to investigate whether these interventions—the main purpose of Jen’s organization—were really working, but she didn’t hesitate to find out the truth.” The results suggested that certain call center interventions weren’t as helpful as anticipated for many types of diseases, but were more effective for others that they didn’t anticipate. For the former group, Joy took action and decided to shorten the length of the calls for customers with certain diseases until it could be determined whether they were helpful at all. For the latter group, her team is expanding and redeploying call center staff to more value-adding activity with customers. She’s working with Cousins’s group on other analytics projects, including controlled experiments that test different coaching approaches, such as engaging more deeply with a customer’s doctor.

However, by 2009 it had become apparent that the fees had become a liability. Expedia’s rates were closer to those of the hotels’ own rates, so the primary appeal of Expedia had become convenience—and change/cancel fees were not convenient. Analysts looked at customer satisfaction rates, and they were particularly low for customers who had to pay the fees. Expedia’s call center representatives were authorized to waive the change/cancel fees for only one reason: a death in the customer’s family. A look at the number of waivers showed double-digit growth for the past three years. Either there was a death epidemic, or customers had figured out they could get their money back this way.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

I’m used to being in control, doing my own planning. Now I feel like someone else has made all the decisions for me. I feel downgraded. —worker at a recently automated General Electric plant in 1970 Every weekday, Conor Sprouls goes to work as a customer service representative for MetLife at a call center in Warwick, Rhode Island. When he gets to his desk, he boots up his computer, and a small blue window appears in the bottom-right corner of his screen. This blue window is Cogito, an app-based “AI coach” that MetLife uses to keep tabs on its human customer service representatives. Every time Sprouls gets a call, Cogito listens in on the line, and provides him with real-time feedback.

In addition to Cogito, there are also retail-oriented AI companies like Percolata, a Silicon Valley start-up that counts Uniqlo and 7-Eleven among its clients, which uses in-store sensors to calculate a “true productivity” score for each worker. Another AI start-up, Beqom, automates the process of calculating worker pay and year-end bonuses. And Nexus AI, a “workforce management” system, allows managers to sort workers into teams based on calculated attributes like “high performers” and “good chemistry.” When I visited MetLife’s call center, I was struck by the authority Cogito’s software had been given, even though it was still fairly new. The app tracks the number of notifications each agent receives, which are compiled into a score and used by managers to track agent performance over time. (Agents aren’t allowed to minimize their Cogito windows on their screens—if they do, the program alerts their supervisor.)

“There was one associate, we were seeing her calls were going several minutes longer than the traditional call,” Smith said. “By listening to Cogito, they could tell she was repeating information that didn’t need to be repeated.” MetLife, which uses Cogito’s software with more than 1,500 of its call center employees, says using the app has increased its customer satisfaction scores by 13 percent. And the MetLife agents I spoke to during my visit didn’t seem miserable about it. (Granted, I was being accompanied by an official from the company’s corporate communications team, so employees may have been on their best behavior.)


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

When we meet for lunch at a steakhouse a five-minute drive away (this is one of those neighborhoods without sidewalks), Hsieh tells me he moved Zappos from San Francisco to Las Vegas because the city has “a call center population” and a twenty-four/seven culture. That’s a nice way of saying this is a place where you can find the lower-skilled, lower-paid workers you need for customer service. Within that universe, though, Zappos really does deliver on its promise of being “free from boring work environments, go-nowhere jobs, and typical corporate America!” Our tour guide—he proudly informs us that you need to know two hundred things about Zappos to be a certified host—says, “I was working at a call center that was kind of the opposite of this—kind of a sweatshop” before joining two and a half years earlier.

For the superstars, it is one of the forces creating richer clients, bigger cases, and fatter fees. But at the bottom, cheaper emerging market lawyers are undercutting the salaries of Western lawyers, just as outsourcing has brought down costs—and wages—in manufacturing and more routine services like call center work. One example is Pangea3, an Indian legal process outsourcing firm, which recently opened offices in the United States. Employing hundreds of lawyers who work around-the-clock shifts, Pangea3 does basic, repetitive legal work like drafting contracts and reviewing documents. Its clients have included blue-chip companies like American Express, GE, Sony, Yahoo!

The Mac 400 is a cheaper, cruder, and lighter version of its American parent—it weighs less than three pounds, rather than fifteen; sells for around $800 (already barely half of the $1,500 it cost when it hit the market), rather than $10,000; and costs $500,000 to develop, rather than $5.4 million. Eight of the nine engineers who created it were based at GE’s Bangalore research lab. Selling Western technology and brands into emerging markets is an old story. So is selling cheap emerging market labor—in the form of manufactured goods, electronics, or commodity white-collar services like call centers—into developed markets. The Mac 400 is an example of the next stage—emerging market engineers, employed by a Western company, creating a product inspired by a Western prototype, and redesigned for emerging market consumers. The world’s smartest megacorporations—GE, Google, Goldman Sachs—are finding ways to profit from the great economic shift of our times.


pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

I’m not anticapitalist. I’m on my fifth start-up. But I am anti-arrogance. Why do the executives who run these call centers think they can decide when I deserve to speak to a human being and when I don’t?” English had channeled a torrent of frustration with automated customer service. If my experience is typical, many companies—especially those in telecommunications, insurance, health care, and travel—are forgoing human contact in order to cut costs, deploying either robots or foreign call centers whose agents know nothing about the business and are paid per call (so they try to make it fast by passing you off to someone else).

What’s needed in those instances is what Mark Granovetter calls the power of weak bonds: the Internet’s unique capacity to assemble diverse groups of people so they can fill in one another’s gaps in knowledge.53 The Value of a Coffee Break The face-to-face advantage wasn’t seen only among techies. The MIT research team has tried out their wearable sensors on all sorts of employees, including those who work in banks, on farms, in hospitals, and at call centers. They’ve found that the happy buzz of workplace chatter predicts productivity everywhere they’ve looked.54 Of all the worksites, their call-center study piqued my curiosity most because working in one can be such a soul-deadening job. Employees face rigid schedules and scripts, social isolation, and an emphasis on quantity over quality, and as a rule, they can’t rise much in the organization.

I figured out how to solve it,’ or ‘This is how to pitch this new product,’ ” he continued. Even he seemed amazed that something as simple as changing the break schedule could have such a dramatic effect. As a result of their experiment, the bank’s call-center manager shifted to coordinated coffee breaks—and the plan worked. Recognizing that employees, like the bank clients they serve, are driven to make genuine human connections has led to vastly better outcomes. Coordinated breaks at all ten of the bank’s call centers (involving twenty-five thousand employees) improved the weak teams’ performance by more than 20 percent, increased performance overall by 8 percent, and boosted employee satisfaction by more than 10 percent, Sandy Pentland reports.


pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Many profiling methods seem complicated, but in essence are simply instantiations of the fundamental concept introduced in Chapter 4: define a numeric function with some parameters, define a goal or objective, and find the parameters that best meet the objective. So let’s consider a simple example from business operations management. Businesses would like to use data to help to understand how well their call centers are supporting their customers.[68] One aspect of supporting customers well is to not leave them sitting on hold for long periods of time. So how might we profile the typical wait time of our customers who call into the call center? We might calculate the mean and standard deviation of the wait time. That seems like exactly what a manager with basic statistical training might do—it turns out to be a simple instance of model fitting.

We might instead report the median, which is not so sensitive to the skew, or possibly even better, fit a different distribution (maybe after talking to a statistically oriented data scientist about what might be appropriate). Figure 12-1. A distribution of wait times for callers into a bank’s call center. To illustrate how a data science savvy manager might proceed, let’s look at a distribution of wait times for callers into a bank’s call center over a couple of months. Figure 12-1 shows such a distribution. Importantly, we see how visualizing the distribution should cause our data science radar to issue an alert. The distribution is not a symmetric bell curve. We should then worry about simply profiling wait times by reporting the mean and standard deviation.

Thanks to David Martens for his help with the mobile locations visualization. Thanks to Chris Volinsky for providing data from his work on the Netflix Challenge. Thanks to Sonny Tambe for early access to his results on big data technologies and productivity. Thanks to Patrick Perry for pointing us to the bank call center example used in Chapter 12. Thanks to Geoff Webb for the use of the Magnum Opus association mining system. Most of all we thank our families for their love, patience and encouragement. A great deal of open source software was used in the preparation of this book and its examples. The authors wish to thank the developers and contributors of: Python and Perl Scipy, Numpy, Matplotlib, and Scikit-Learn Weka The Machine Learning Repository at the University of California at Irvine (Bache & Lichman, 2013) Finally, we encourage readers to check our website for updates to this material, new chapters, errata, addenda, and accompanying slide sets


Kanban in Action by Marcus Hammarberg, Joakim Sunden

Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, continuous integration, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Lean Startup, performance metric, place-making, systems thinking, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Two Sigma

Finding out what the customer needs and values and delivering just that also builds quality in. Failure demand in call centers In the book Freedom from Command and Control: A Better Way to Make the Work Work (Vanguard Consulting Ltd., 2003, http://amzn.com/0954618300), John Seddon tells the story of a call center for which about 40% of calls were questions about invoices. The failure to create a clear and understandable invoice caused a lot of demand on the system that easily could be avoided. And sure enough—when the company changed the layout and structure of the invoice, the failure demand went down, and the call center got a lot fewer calls in total. A Word from the Coach One simple and useful practice is to start tracking and visualizing the failure demand.

That, at first, might seem obvious and to be something you’d want; but when you think about it, it’s a bit dangerous, too. If you start to measure how long each support call takes in a call center, you’ll find that people begin closing calls early rather than focusing on helping the customer. Workers in the call center will prefer short calls over longer ones, even if that means their customers won’t get the help they need. Metrics may drive the call-center employees toward the wrong behavior. The knowledge that “you get what you measure” could also be used to your advantage. One such technique is to put a limit on the amount of work in the Done column, sometimes referred to as the cake limit (see chapter 12).

Index [A][B][C][D][E][F][G][H][I][J][K][L][M][N][O][P][Q][R][S][T][U][V][W][X] A A-team A/B testing abandoned ideas, as metric Accept column acceptance testing accountability Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success Agile Manifesto Agile Retrospectives Agile software development Agile42 AgileZen Analyze column Anderson, David J. Andon boards animals as avatars annotating cards Aptitud B balancing flow speed and work items batches, working with smaller BDD (behavior-driven development) Bellware, Scott big daily boredom bugs giving precedence to types of work items business impact, 2nd C call centers cartoons on cards celebrations frequent flyer miles WIP limit CFD (cumulative flow diagram) data needed for drawing diagram overview reading diagram charts. See diagrams. Coaching Kata Cockburn, Alistair coin flipping game. See also Pass the Pennies. component teams constraints.


pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

Indeed, if you open a factory, and are doing things right, “it will be more productive a year later because the workers themselves on the factory floor are critical thinkers and can improve processes along the way,” said Byron Auguste, the McKinsey director. In any factory or call center, he noted, “there is often dramatic variation in productivity in different parts of the system. If you have continuous learners on the shop floor or in the call center, there is a constant opportunity to learn and spread the word, and then everyone improves. If you are doing that in every node of your production, design, and aftersales service, you will have a system that delivers three percent productivity growth every year and is not dependent on new inventions coming out of Carnegie Mellon University or Silicon Valley.”

It all happened so fast, but it is clear that sometime around the year 2000 many people in many places realized that they were engaging with people with whom they had never engaged before—whether it was Tom’s mom and her new online bridge partner in Siberia or the local gas station owner discovering through the Internet a new supplier of cheaper tires in Panama. At the same time, these same people in these same places discovered that they were being touched by people who had never touched them before—whether it was a young Indian voice on the phone from a Bangalore call center trying to sign them up for a new Visa card or a young Chinese student in Shanghai who had just taken the place they had hoped to have at Harvard. What they were all feeling was that the world is flat (the title of Tom’s 2005 book)—meaning that more people could suddenly compete, connect, and collaborate with more other people from more different places for less money with greater ease than ever before in the history of humankind.

In today’s hyper-connected marketplace, to be a leading company, now a company has to be a company of leaders—every individual has to contribute significant value and impact.” Herewith, the new help-wanted section. White-Collar Indian In February 2004 Tom went to Bangalore, India, to make a documentary program on outsourcing for the New York Times–Discovery Channel. Part of the documentary was filmed at the outsourcing company 24/7 Customer and its call center, manned by hundreds of Indians doing what were then relatively low-wage white-collar service jobs via long-distance phone lines. Late at night—daytime in America—the room was a cacophony of voices, with young Indian men and women trying to fix someone’s Dell computer or straighten out a credit card account or sell a new phone contract.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

If your phone is infected with malware, once you dial your bank’s customer service number, the rootkit detects one of its targeted institutions is being phoned and can intercept and reroute the call. It is another classic man-in-the-middle attack that allows the criminals to shape and mold the reality you see on your screen and bend it to their desired outcome. As a result, when you dial 1-800-4MY-BANK, your call is invisibly rerouted to a call center manned and operated by international organized crime. Given the wide use of foreign call centers by financial institutions, who would question an accent on the other end of the line when you spoke to your “bank”? The spoof would be relatively easy to perpetrate. Once you were connected, you would be asked for your account number, mother’s maiden name, password, and other security information “just to verify you.”

In addition to hacker-for-hire services, Crime, Inc. subcontracts out for a wide variety of administrative services such as banking, translation, travel, and call center operations. For instance, companies such as CallService.biz fill a niche in the digital underground by providing on-demand English-, French-, and German-speaking stand-ins to help crooks contravene bank security measures required to initiate wire transfers, unblock hacked accounts, or change address contact information with the banks. Staffed 24/7, the multilingual crime call center will play any duplicitous role you would like, including providing job and educational references, for a mere $10 per call.

Simple enough if you dial Mom and she picks up your call. But what about when you dial Citibank, Bank of America, or Wells Fargo? You’re not reaching a banker at the local branch the way you might have twenty years ago. Instead, you’re being connected to someone you’ve never spoken to before from a call center, generally in a foreign country manned by people with foreign accents. By using mobile phone malware, hackers can install a “rootkit” on your mobile phone that gives them control over all features of the device, including its touch screen and number pad. Rootkits are malicious software that hide normal computer processes and functions from a user’s view and give hackers administrative or “root” access to any device.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Our sales pitch is that if you buy our software you won’t need to hire an army of outbound sales reps who spend their days blindly calling people, because our software will generate inbound leads and bring the customers to you. Yet here we are, operating an old-fashioned call center, with a bunch of low-paid kids calling thousands of people, day after day. HubSpot doesn’t keep this room a secret, but the company doesn’t talk about it much, either. It’s not exactly a lovable, magical, one-plus-one-equals-three kind of place. The truth is that most tech companies do some selling over the phone, and for a simple reason: It’s cheap. Oracle, a $40 billion software company, has started hiring thousands of college students and cramming them into call centers, as a way to lower its selling costs. Tech companies refer to these operations as “inside sales,” which sounds more respectable than “telemarketing.”

I tell him I’m sorry about my outburst, and I can’t wait to get started on this new project. “Oh,” Zack says, “there’s one more thing.” The content factory has been getting overcrowded, he tells me. So in addition to getting my own little blog, I am going to be moving to a new location, away from the blog team, in the telemarketing call center. It’s the loudest room in the building. People call it the spider monkey room. Zack assures me that this move will only be temporary. HubSpot is renovating space on the fourth floor, and eventually our team will move up there. Once again I give him my best “team player” smile and tell him this all sounds great.

As a CMO friend of mine puts it, “The lower end of the market is a dial-for-dollars segment.” HubSpot isn’t the only software company using a low-cost sales model. Another friend of mine works at a software company that’s about the same size as HubSpot and engages in the same kind of touchy-feely rhetoric while behind the scenes operating the same kind of call center. The company’s investors are demanding astronomical growth rates, and while cold-calling thousands of leads may be a brute-force, blunt-instrument tactic, it’s the only way they can hit their numbers. “When you get a hard-charging sales culture in place, and you’re trying to keep up insane growth rates, all that high-minded preaching about how the New Economy means not doing things like they used to do in the Bad Old Days—all that stuff goes out the window, and they bring in Alec Baldwin to give his steak knives speech,” my friend says.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

One is globalization, in effect bringing a large new source of cheap labor into the domestic economy; either through cheap imports or the offshoring of production, domestic workers have to compete with workers elsewhere who work for much lower wages (although they are also less productive). This could explain downward pressure on blue-collar wages or the low pay in basic services such as call centers. Figure 9. The capitalist pyramid. The other potential explanation is the adoption of new technologies requiring skills that were initially in short supply. Companies that use computers and other new technologies need people with greater cognitive abilities—computers can do the easy, repetitive work, so the humans need to do the more challenging and creative work.

Alan Blinder showed that offshorable jobs in the United States had suffered an estimated 13 percent wage penalty as of 2004.31 Another study found a 1 percentage point increase in the low-wage import share is associated with a 2.8 percent decline in blue-collar wages.32 On balance, however, the technical change explanation emerges as the most important driver of increasing income inequality.33 This is not the popular perception. When a factory or call center closes in the United States and reopens in China or India, or when cheap clothing imports put domestic manufacturers out of business because they can’t compete, or when immigrant workers seem to bid down wages for low-skill jobs in the neighborhood, it seems pretty obvious that globalization is the culprit for the fact that low-income families have been faring poorly in recent decades.

For example, rather than being a center for auto manufacture, like the Detroit of the past, Hungary has become a specialist producer of auto engines, making one in every twenty-five engines in the world, while Poland specializes in transmissions, and so on. It is not just manufacturing that has globalized. Professional services are global too. Bankers, lawyers, consultants, and the like are likely to be widely traveled with projects or colleagues or postings overseas. Many more routine services, such as call centers and medical imaging offices, have also begun to ship tasks to developing countries with cheaper labor, although this outsourcing is much smaller in scale than the impression given by the media. In both cases, manufacturing and services, globalization and the adoption of new technologies have gone hand in hand.


pages: 86 words: 27,453

Why We Work by Barry Schwartz

Atul Gawande, call centre, deskilling, do well by doing good, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Higgs boson, if you build it, they will come, invisible hand, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, scientific management, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System

Taylor, in his book The Principles of Scientific Management, laid out in microscopic detail the best ways to divide production into individual jobs, so that little skill or attention was required, and the best way to arrange pay, so that maximum effort would be produced. Factories like this have mostly left American shores, but one sees the same pattern played out in modern versions of the factory, like call centers and order-fulfillment centers. Workers in both environments are micromanaged. In call centers, they’re given detailed scripts to follow (which is necessary, since they are often located in a different country, thousands of miles away, have trouble with the language and, beyond the scripts, know almost nothing of the products or services about which they are taking calls.)

You might believe that for most people, by their very natures, work is about pay and nothing more. Only the “elite” want challenge, meaning, and engagement, and can expect it from their work. Aside from being more than a little arrogant, this view is incorrect. Many people who do what we think of as mundane jobs—janitors, factory workers, call-center employees—care about more than the wage. And plenty of high-flying professionals work just for the money. What people come to seek in work largely depends on what their work makes available. And the conditions of human labor created by the industrial revolution, and perpetuated thanks in part to theories from the social sciences, have systematically deprived people of fulfillment from their work.


pages: 238 words: 77,730

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

23andMe, AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, behavioural economics, business process, call centre, clean water, commoditize, computer age, Demis Hassabis, Frank Gehry, information retrieval, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, job automation, machine translation, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, thinkpad, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Would this type of machine soon be popping up in offices and answering customers’ questions on the phone? Ferrucci envisioned a Jeopardy machine spawning a host of specialized know-it-alls. With the right training, a technology that could understand everyday language and retrieve answers in a matter of seconds could fit just about anywhere. Its first job would likely be in call centers. It could answer tax questions, provide details about bus schedules, ask about the symptoms of a laptop on the fritz and walk a customer through a software update. That stuff was obvious. But there were plenty of other jobs. Consider publicly traded companies, Ferrucci said. They had to comply with a dizzying assortment of rules and regulations, everything from leaks of inside information in e-mails to the timely disclosure of earnings surprises or product failures to regulators and investors.

Like practically everyone else on the team, she had a doctorate in computer science, hers from the University of Delaware. She had worked for five years at Lucent Technology’s Bell Labs, in New Jersey. There she taught machines how to participate in a dialogue and how to modulate their voices to communicate different signals. (Lucent was developing automated call centers.) When Chu-Carroll came to IBM in 2001, joining her husband, Mark, she plunged into building Q-A technologies. (Mark later left for Google.) In mid-2007, the nascent Jeopardy system wasn’t really a machine at all. Fragments of a Jeopardy player existed as a collection of software programs, some of them hand-me-downs from the recent bake-off, all of them easy to load onto a laptop.

Of all the data stored in the world’s computers and coursing through its networks, the vast majority is unstructured. Hewlett Packard, for example, the biggest computer company on earth, gets a hundred fifty million Web visits a month. That’s nearly thirty-five hundred customers and prospects per minute. Those visits produce data. So do notes from the company’s call centers, online chat rooms, blog entries, warranty claims, and user reviews. “Ninety percent of our data is unstructured,” said Prasanna Dhore, HP’s vice president of customer intelligence. “There’s always a gap between what you want to know about the customer and what is knowable.” Analysis of the pile of data helps reduce that gap, bringing the customer into sharper focus.


pages: 274 words: 72,657

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Cal Newport, call centre, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, fear of failure, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, meta-analysis, peak-end rule, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, TED Talk

(For instance, if the customer had made six previous calls to get an issue resolved, then it didn’t matter if the seventh was handled brilliantly.) The CEB team called the customers’ memory of previous treatment their “baggage.” Most call center reps had the instinct to avoid the customer’s baggage. If they saw in the records that the customer had been passed around a lot, they wouldn’t mention it. Why bring it up? It’s like pouring salt on the wound, they figured. Better just to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. So the CEB ran a set of studies on the art of “baggage handling.” At one call center, the researchers assigned reps at random either to ignore customer baggage or to address it. For instance, let’s say that a customer had called repeatedly about battery problems with a new tablet computer.

What’s indisputable is that when we assess our experiences, we don’t average our minute-by-minute sensations. Rather, we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits, and the transitions. This is a critical lesson for anyone in service businesses—from restaurants to medical clinics to call centers to spas—where success hinges on the customer experience. Consider the Magic Castle Hotel, which as of press time was one of the three top-rated hotels in Los Angeles, out of hundreds. It triumphed over competition like the Four Seasons Hotel at Beverly Hills and the Ritz-Carlton Los Angeles. Magic Castle’s reviews are stunning: Out of more than 2,900 reviews on Trip-Advisor, over 93% of guests rate the hotel as either “excellent” or “very good.”

As Elam said above, “we were strictly peers at work and really knew very little about each other beyond our roles at the company.” That’s a frozen relationship. But, as we’ve seen, acting with responsiveness to others can create tighter bonds: bonds between teachers and parents, doctors and patients, call center reps and customers, colleagues at work, and even strangers in a lab experiment. And those bonds can continue to strengthen with astonishing speed. A defining moment of connection can be both brief and extraordinary. * * * I. For another example of nonresponsiveness, look no further than your teenager.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Others are willing to pay a slight premium to avoid being stigmatized as a company that ships jobs overseas. Somewhere in Hollywood it’s quite possible that a young showrunner is working up a script called Insourcing, about the misadventures of an Indian manager sent to run a call center in the United States. Or he could just crib from the May 2011 Washington Post article by Paul Glader. Glader visited a call center in New York run by Aegis Communications, a unit of the Indian conglomerate Essar, where workers earn $12 to $14 per hour to “make or take calls for customers of prescription drug plans or Medicare contracts and enter and verify information.”

Even though the United States doesn’t try very hard, and imposes needless barriers on itself, between 2005 and 2011 service exports rose more rapidly than goods exports did. And there’s room for much more. Rising wealth around the world means greater demand for services. Developing countries build exports—goods or services—by taking the low road: set up a factory to make cheap lightbulbs or build a low-wage call center, and you’re off. But it’s not all about a race to the bottom. The United States exports a lot of very expensive services—money management, education, health care, tourism—that have previously been unaffordable for the vast majority of humanity and that are getting more affordable. Like the Collinses of Wallquest before 2008, most American businesses were content to sell to their friends and neighbors and never gave much thought to selling overseas.

Bull, a show about hot young twentysomethings doing stuff on Wall Street, aired on TNT in August 2000, just as the stock market was going to melt down, and Hot Properties, an ABC sitcom about hot young real estate brokers in Los Angeles, debuted in the fall of 2005, just as the housing market was about to peak. The NBC sitcom Outsourced, about the hilarity that ensues when a young American runs a call center in India, aired in the fall of 2010. At precisely that moment the smart money was beginning to move in the other direction. Like manufacturers, some service companies have found that they may have taken outsourcing or offshoring one or two steps too far. The same set of factors that push executives to reconsider manufacturing in the United States are leading some to reconsider the location of service positions that had been offshored.


pages: 255 words: 76,495

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff by Clara Shih

Benchmark Capital, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, glass ceiling, jimmy wales, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, pets.com, pre–internet, rolodex, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social web, software as a service, tacit knowledge, Tony Hsieh, web application

Unlike sales account executives, support reps are typically not dedicated to specific accounts. But that doesn’t mean they can’t get quickly up to speed on the person calling in for help. Putting the customer at ease is especially important because by the time the customer calls, she has experienced a certain level of frustration, not to mention likely having been put on hold by the call center system. Increasingly, support reps are making small talk using personal information about a customer from social networking profiles and CRM systems. That way, reps can start calls on a more positive note and keep the customer engaged if she needs time, for example, to look up a solution or ask a colleague for help.

Last, but not least, companies have realized they can crowdsource, or outsource to the “crowd,” a substantial portion of support questions by encouraging customers to talk to one another, troubleshoot for one another, and share tips and tricks in online forums. For instance, a number of such customer self-support groups have sprung up on Facebook, often to vendors’ surprise and delight as these greatly alleviate the burden on their own reps and call centers. To better understand this phenomenon, I monitored the YouTube discussion boards on Facebook for several weeks. A few individuals in particular were extremely active in helpFrom the Library of Kerri Ross 78 Pa r t I I Tra n s fo r m i n g t h e Way We D o B u s i n e s s ing answer questions posted by other community members.

Most cited a passion for the product and a desire to demonstrate their knowledge and be viewed as an expert in the community. Recently, salesforce.com unveiled its Service Cloud offering, connecting product conversations across different information silos such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook with internal knowledge bases that power customer portals and call center applications. The Service Cloud allows vendors to monitor, aggregate, and search conversations customers are having about their products, and to incorporate crowdsourced solutions into their centralized knowledge based in Salesforce CRM. In addition, Get Satisfaction, Lithium, and FixYa are popular startups that specialize in crowdsourced support tools.


pages: 314 words: 94,600

Business Metadata: Capturing Enterprise Knowledge by William H. Inmon, Bonnie K. O'Neil, Lowell Fryman

affirmative action, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, continuous integration, corporate governance, create, read, update, delete, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, informal economy, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, semantic web, tacit knowledge, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application

Feldman uses a revenue number of $500K/year per employee, which translates to $240/hr. 1000 employees * 50% failed searches * 240/hr * 2.5 hours searching = $300K/week or greater than $15M/year. 70 Chapter 4 Business Metadata, Communication, and Search 4.4.2.6 Decrease in Call Center Volume The impact of failed searches on call center volume can be measured. If both internal and external personnel can find the information they need on a Web portal, then this represents less HR or sales requests. Feldman reports that call center volume decreases by 30% when search is improved. Good online customer service can handle up to 90 percent of customer questions. Implementing premium search can immediately boost call deflection, cutting the number of calls in half.

Feldman backs up her statistics by noting that others have found similar results, notably: ✦ Ford Motor Company ✦ Working council of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) ✦ Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) ✦ Reuters ✦ Kit Sims Taylor Here are some attempts to quantify the cost impact of failed search in the enterprise. 4.4.2.1 Attempts to Quantify Search Impact Feldman identifies three types of costs that can be quantified: ✦ Employee time wasted ✦ Duplicating/reworking information ✦ Opportunity cost On the positive side, Feldman and Seybold identify two areas in which increased search capacity has a positive impact: ✦ Decrease in call center volume ✦ Increase in sales (conversion rates and shopping basket size—e-commerce) Each of these areas is summarized below. 4.4 Communications and Search 4.4.2.2 69 Baseline Assumptions The IDC study begins with the following baseline assumptions: ✦ Each employee costs the enterprise $80,000, which includes salary plus benefits. ✦ The average knowledge worker spends 2.5 hours/day (30%) searching for information. ✦ The enterprise employs 1000 knowledge workers. ✦ 50% of information is not centrally indexed (housed in silos as on someone’s notebook computer or a database). ✦ 50% of Web searches fail/are abandoned. 4.4.2.3 Employee Time Wasted Based on these assumptions, Feldman calculated that the enterprise wastes $48,000 per week, or almost $2.5 million a year in searches.

Appendix Metadata System of Record Example Table 1 Metadata object system of record Meta Object Entity Name Entity Type Entity Definition Entity Scope Entity Active Ind Entity Logical Business Rule Logical Application Name Entity Synonym Name Logical Attribute Logical Attribute Definition Attribute Logical Business Rule Attribute Logical FK Ind Attribute Business Area Logical Business Function Data Subject Area Physical Column Name Physical Column Data Type Physical Column Length Physical Column Precision Strategic Modeling Tool Tactical Modeling Tool C C C C C U U C U DBMS Tool Data Integration Tool Reporting Tool U C C C C U C U C C U U C C U U C U C U C U C U (Cont.) 283 284 Appendix Table 1 Metadata object system of record (continued) Meta Object Strategic Modeling Tool Physical Column Decimal places Physical Column Default Value Physical Column Nullable Ind Physical Column Comment Physical Column Primary Key Ind Physical Column Foreign Key Ind Table Name Table Owner Table Type Table Comments Physical Table Name Physical Column Name Physical View Name Physical Database Name Physical Schema Name ETL Object Name Source Table Source Column Target Table Target Column ETL Job Name ETL Transformation Rule ETL Job Run Date ETL Job Execution Time ETL Job Row Count ETL Job Status Report Name Report Element Name Report Table Name Report Database Name Report DB Sequence Report Element Business Rule Tactical Modeling Tool DBMS Tool C U C U C U C U C C C C C U U U U U C C C C C Data Integration Tool Reporting Tool C R R R R C C C C C C C R R R R C Appendix 285 Metadata Usage Matrix Example The following table summarizes the metadata objects and the anticipated usage of each object in the following functions: Table 1 Summary of metadata objects usage Source – Metadata Object Entity Name Entity Type Entity Definition Entity Scope Entity Container Entity Active Ind Entity Logical Business Rule Logical Application Name Entity Synonym Name Logical Attribute Logical Attribute Definition Attribute Logical Business Rule Attribute Logical FK Ind Attribute Business Area Logical Business Function Data Subject Area Physical Column Name Physical Column Data Type Physical Column Length Physical Column Precision Physical Column Decimal Places Physical Column Default Value Physical Column Nullable Ind Data Lineage Impact Analysis Definition and or Glossary Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y (Cont.) 286 Appendix Table 1 Summary of metadata objects usage (continued) Source – Metadata Object Physical Column Comment Physical Column Primary Key Ind Physical Column Foreign Key Ind Table Name Table Owner Table Type Table Comments Physical Table Name Physical Column Name Physical View Name Physical Database Name Physical Schema Name ETL Object Name Source Table Source Column Target Table Target Column ETL Job Name ETL Transformation Rule ETL Job Run Date ETL Job Execution Time ETL Job Row Count ETL Job Status Report Name Report Element Name Report Table Name Report Database Name Report DB Sequence Report Element Business Rule Data Lineage Impact Analysis Definition and or Glossary Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Index Abstraction, linking structured and unstructured data, 230–231 Accuracy, metadata information, 33–34 Administration, infrastructure issues functionality requirements, 169 history keeping, 169–170 BI, see Business intelligence Broader term, definition component, 61, 63–64 Business Glossary features, 111–112 integrated technical and business metadata delivery, 152–153 Business intelligence (BI), business metadata delivery infrastructure, 163 Business metadata capture, see Capture, business metadata components, 13 definition, 38 delivery, see Delivery, business metadata funding, see Funding, business metadata historical perspective, 3–11 importance, 274–275 locations corporate forms, 15–16 reports, 14, 29–31 screens, 13–14 origins, 19–20 repository construction, see Metadata project resources, 281–282 technical metadata comparison, 12–13 conversion, 135–136, 182–186 infrastructure for integration, 165–166 separation, 140 tracking over time, 20–21 types, 158–160 Business rules business management, 238–239 business metadata, 237, 245 capturing rationale, 238–239 definition, 235–236 maintenance, 242 management, 243 metadata repository, 244–245 ruleflow, 242–243 sources, 237–238 systems, 239, 242–243 Call center volume, search problem quantification, 70 Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), note-taking as asset producing, 265 Capture, business metadata barriers, 275 corporate knowledge base, 93–94 culture, 95–96 editing automation, 128–129 expansion of definition and descriptions, 129–131 granularization, 129 homonym resolution, 132–134 manual editing, 134–135 staging area, 134 synonym resolution, 131–132 Governance Lite™, 107–109, 111 individual documentation problem, 114–115 knowledge socialization, see Knowledge socialization metadata sources comparison of sources, 127 data warehouse, 126 database management system system catalogs, 124 documents, 123 enterprise resource planning applications, 122 extract-transform-load, 124–125 legacy systems, 125–126 on-line analytical processing tools, 124 on-line transaction processing, 125–126 reports, 122–123 spreadsheets, 123 principles, 95–96 publicity, 112–113 rationale, 90–93 technical metadata conversion to business metadata, 135–136 287 288 Index Capture, business metadata (Continued) technology search, 109–111 Web 2.0 folksonomy, 118–119 mashups, 115–116 overview, 115 Card catalog, see Library card catalog CDC, see Centers for Disease Control Centers for Disease Control (CDC), linking structured and unstructured data, 231 CIF, see Corporate Information Factory C-map, see Concept Map CMMI, see Capability Maturity Model Integration Collective intelligence, knowledge socialization, 97 Communications audits, 251 clarity problems bad business decisions, 57 English language limitations, 59 everyday communications, 56–57 faulty rollups, 57–58 units of measure differences, 59 classification, see Taxonomy definitions components, 61–62 guidelines, 60–61 importance, 59–60 miscellaneous guidelines, 64 usage notes, 62–64 historic library creation, 253 human/computer communication problem, 276–278 screening, 251–253 search problem information and knowledge workers, 65–66 information provider guidelines, 71–72 quantification, 67–70 search techniques, 71 tracking down information, 66–67 Compliance communications audits, 251 historic library creation, 253 screening, 251–253 data profiling, 254–256 financial audit metadata utility, 250 transaction background activities, 250–251 prospects, 280 Sarbanes-Oxley Act provisions, 248–240 types, 249–251 Concept Map (C-map), semantic framework, 205, 209 Conceptual model, semantic framework, 204 Controlled vocabulary (CV), semantic framework, 200–201 Corporate forms, business metadata content, 15–16 Corporate Information Factory (CIF), implementation, 81–82 Corporate knowledge base, components, 93–94 Create Read Update Delete (CRUD), conflict resolution, 167 CRM, see Customer relationship management Cross selling, business metadata capture rationale, 92 CRUD, see Create Read Update Delete Customer relationship management (CRM), business metadata capture rationale, 92 Customer, definition, 56 CV, see Controlled vocabulary DASD, see Direct access storage device Data, definition, 176 Database management system (DBMS) historical perspective, 5 metadata storage, 19 system catalog as metadata resource, 124 Data Flux, data quality presentation, 190–191 Data Governance Council, metadata stewardship, 42–43 Data quality continuum, 190 Data Warehousing report, 49 definition, 177 presentation, 189–190 Data Stewardship Council, metadata stewardship, 43–44 Data warehouse historical perspective, 7–9 infrastructure, 160–161 metadata resource, 126 metadata warehouse features, 161–162 DBMS, see Database management system Decision table, business rule representation, 239–242 Decision tree, business rule representation, 239, 241 Index Definition components, 61–62 dictionary role in information quality, 186 guidelines, 60–61 importance, 59–60 miscellaneous guidelines, 64 usage notes, 62–64 Delivery, business metadata examples corporate dictionary, 147–148 integrated technical and business metadata delivery, 152–153 mashups, 149–150 technical use, 151–152 training, 148–149 visual analytic techniques, 150–151 indirect usage accessibility from multiple places, 142–143 application access, 147 interactive reports, 145–146 overview, 141–142 Web delivery, 143–144 information quality business metadata, 188–190 infrastructure considerations business intelligence environments, 163 graphical affinity, 163–164 legacy environment, 162–163 mashups, 164 principles, 140–141 prospects, 280 Description Logics (DL), semantic framework, 206 Dictionary, see Glossary Direct access storage device (DASD), historical perspective, 4–6 Disk storage, historical perspective, 4–6 DL, see Description Logics Documents, metadata resource, 123 Editing, metadata automation, 128–129 expansion of definition and descriptions, 129–131 granularization, 129 homonym resolution, 132–134 manual editing, 134–135 staging area, 134 synonym resolution, 131–132 Employee turnover, business metadata capture rationale, 91–92 289 Enterprise resource planning (ERP), metadata resource, 85, 122 Entity/relationship (ER) model, semantic framework, 203–204, 208, 210–211 ER model, see Entity/relationship model ERP, see Enterprise resource planning ETL, see Extract-transform-load Extract-transform-load (ETL), metadata resource, 85, 124–125 Federated metadata, integrated metadata management, 168 Financial audit metadata utility, 250 transaction background activities, 250–251 First-order logic (FOL), semantic framework, 206 FOL, see First-order logic Folksonomy knowledge capture, 118–119 self-organizing tags, 77 Forms, see Corporate forms Fourth generation language historical perspective, 6–7 metadata handling, 11 Funding, business metadata advantages and disadvantages of approaches, 52–53 centralized implementation, 51 localized implementation, 51–52 overview, 50–51 Glossary business functions, 60 information quality role, 186 semantic framework, 201 Governance Lite™, knowledge capture, 107–109, 111 Granularization, metadata, 129 Graphical affinity, business metadata delivery infrastructure, 163–164 Grid, metadata representation, 18 Groupware, knowledge socialization, 100–103, 279 Homonyms, resolution, 132–134 Industrial recognition, text, 227 Information quality business and technical metadata interaction, 177–186 business metadata delivery, 188–190 290 Index Information quality (Continued) definition, 177 dictionary role, 186 methodology, 187–188 Information Technology (IT) department challenges, 278–279 metadata responsibility, 38–39 Information, definition, 177 IT department, see Information Technology department KB, see Knowledge base KM, see Knowledge management Knowledge base (KB) definition, 267 building, 267 Knowledge management (KM) business metadata intersection artifact generation, 262–263 corporate dictionary example, 263 definition, 260 goals, 260–261 importance, 261 social issues graying work force, 269–270 socialization effect on knowledge, 270 tacit knowledge, see Tacit knowledge techniques, 267–268 Knowledge socialization collective intelligence, 97 experts, 97–98 groupware, 100–103, 279 knowledge management, 268, 270 technology fostering portal and collaboration servers, 100–103 social networking, 99 wikis, 103–106 Knowledge worker metadata capture, 94 search problem, 65–66 Legacy systems business metadata delivery infrastructure, 162–163 metadata resource, 125–126 Library card catalog, metadata analogy, 27–29 Life cycle, metadata, 45–48 Magnetic tape data storage, 4 languages for data reading, 10 Mashup business metadata delivery, 149–150, 164 knowledge capture, 115–116 Master data management (MDM) conflict resolution, 167 overview, 22 MDM, see Master data management Metadata definition, 9, 26–27 examples, 9 grid representation, 18 management importance, 32 metamodel, 158–160 system of record example, 283–284 usage matrix example, 285–286 Metadata project business metadata versus technical metadata, 83–84 buying versus building, 170–172 classification, 82–83 funding, see Funding, business metadata iterations of development, 84 local metadata tools, 85 metadata sources, 86–87 preexisting repositories, 172–173 rationale, 80–82 scope defining, 85–87 Metadata Stewardship Council, responsibilities, 44–45 Narrower term, definition component, 61, 63–64 National Cancer Institute (NCI), semantic vocabulary implementation, 214–216 NCI, see National Cancer Institute Null, data profiling, 183, 185–186 ODS, see Operational data store OLAP, see Online analytical processing On-line analytical processing, metadata resource, 85124 On-line transaction processing, metadata resource, 125–126 Ontology, semantic framework, 207 Operational data store (ODS), data warehousing, 8 Opportunity cost, search problem quantification, 69 OWL, see Web Ontology Language Ownership, definition, 40 Patterns, identification, 183–184, 186 PC, see Personal computer Index Personal computer (PC) historical perspective, 7 metadata handling, 11 Preferred term, definition component, 62 Punch cards historical perspective, 4 metadata, 9–10 Quality, see Data quality; Information quality Range of values, data profiling, 183, 186 RDF, see Resource Definition Framework Reference file overview, 21–22 updating, 22 Regulations, see Compliance Related term, definition component, 61 Reports interactive reports, 145–146 metadata resource, 14, 29–31, 122–123 Repository, see Metadata project Resource Definition Framework (RDF), semantic framework, 204–205 Reuse, metadata, 32–33 Sales, search problem quantification, 70 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, provisions, 248–240 Screen, business metadata content, 13–14 Search problem enterprise search, 279 information and knowledge workers, 65–66 information provider guidelines, 71–72 quantification, 67–70 search techniques, 71 tracking down information, 66–67 Self-organizing map, linking structured and unstructured data, 233 Self-organizing tags, taxonomy, 77 Semantics business metadata delivering definitions and relationships, 208–209 exposing semantics to business, 210–211 expression, 209–210 overview, 207–208 context sensitivity, 197–199 framework Concept Map, 205, 209 conceptual model, 204 controlled vocabulary, 200–201 Description Logics, 206 291 entity/relationship model, 203–204, 208, 210–211 first-order logic, 206 glossary, 201 ontology, 207 Resource Definition Framework, 204–205 taxonomy, 202 thesauri, 203 topic map, 205 UML, 205–206 Web Ontology Language, 204–205, 210 human/computer concept, 199–200, 278 importance, 196–197 practical issues integration, 211–212 National Cancer Institute semantic vocabulary implementation, 214–216 service-oriented architecture, 214 Web Services, 212–213 prospects for integration and discovery, 280 semantic Web, 195–196 spectrum, 200–201, 208 Semistructured data, examples and technologies, 222–223 Serial transfer, knowledge management, 267–268 Service-oriented architecture (SOA) integrated metadata management, 168 semantics integration, 214 SOA, see Service-oriented architecture SOAP, semantic interface, 212 Socialization, see Knowledge socialization Social networking, knowledge socialization, 99 Spreadsheets, metadata resource, 123 Stemmed words, text distillation, 225 Stewardship business metadata approaches, 44–45 artifacts, 44 Data Governance Council, 42–43 Data Stewardship Council, 43–44 historical perspective, 41–42 Metadata Stewardship Council, 44–45 definition, 40–41 Structured metadata characteristics, 16–18 examples and technologies, 219–220 linking structured and unstructured data abstraction, 230–231 examples, 231, 233 292 Index Structured metadata (Continued) integration, 230 unstructured data comparison, 221 Synonyms, resolution, 131–132 Tacit knowledge definition, 94, 264 note-taking as asset producing, 265–266 transfer nurturing, 266 Taxonomy basic rules, 73, 75 document categorization, 76 governance and taxonomy, 77 language and vocabulary, 75–76 lowest common denominator, 75 overview, 72 self-organizing tags, 77 semantic framework, 202 simplicity, 76 Team Room, knowledge socialization, 100–103 Technical metadata business metadata comparison, 12–13 conversion, 135–136 infrastructure for integration, 165–166 separation, 140 categories, 2 Technical metadata conversion to business metadata, 135–136, 182–186 profiling, 179–182 Text business metadata terms, 227–228 communications audits, 252–253 distillation, 224–229 extraneous words, 225 industrial recognition, 227 pulling, 223 relationship recognition, 228–229 stemmed words, 225 word counting, 226 Thesauri, semantic framework, 203 Topic map, semantic framework, 205 UML, semantic framework, 205–206 Unstructured metadata characteristics, 16–18 examples and technologies, 220–221 mining prospects, 281 structured data comparison, 221 text business metadata terms, 227–228 distillation, 224–229 extraneous words, 225 industrial recognition, 227 pulling, 223 relationship recognition, 228–229 stemmed words, 225 word counting, 226 Value/frequency report, data profiling, 181, 184–186 Web 2.0 knowledge capture folksonomy, 118–119 mashups, 115–116 overview, 115 semantic Web, 195–196 Web Ontology Language (OWL), semantic framework, 204–205, 210 Web Services, semantics interface, 212–213 Wiki governance, 106 knowledge capture, 104 limitations, 105–106 portal collaboration comparison, 105 wikinomics, 104 Wikipedia, 103–104, 212 Words, see Text


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

By 2019, the major stock exchanges were staffed by only small groups of people relegated to certain areas of the trading floor.27 The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that even these few holdouts are no longer essential, as the exchanges moved rapidly to fully electronic trading. Call centers that provide customer service or technical support are another area that is clearly ripe for disruption. Rapid advances in the natural language processing capabilities of artificial intelligence are producing applications that can automate ever more of this work via both voice communication technology and online chatbots. These jobs, of course, were already highly vulnerable to offshoring. As technology has advanced, however, many of the call center jobs in lower-wage countries like India and the Philippines are being vaporized by automation.

As technology has advanced, however, many of the call center jobs in lower-wage countries like India and the Philippines are being vaporized by automation. Responding to customer service queries is a task that in many ways is ideally suited to machine learning. Each interaction between a customer and a call center worker generates a rich set of data, including the question asked, the answer provided and whether the interaction fully resolved the issue. Machine learning algorithms can churn through thousands of these interactions and quickly become proficient at responding to the significant fraction of queries that tend to come up again and again. And once the system is in place, and as more customer calls come in, the algorithms get smarter and smarter.

And once the system is in place, and as more customer calls come in, the algorithms get smarter and smarter. There are literally dozens of startup companies offering AI-powered chatbots to automate customer service. Many of these are positioned in specific sectors such as healthcare or financial services.28 As these technologies continue to advance, call center staffing is likely to fall as things eventually reach a point where a human operator is required only for the most challenging customer interactions. The ability to write computer code is often presented as a kind of panacea for technological job market disruption. Those losing jobs in industries like journalism or even coal mining have been advised to “learn to code.”


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

If peripheral jobs are created, it is much more likely to be in the country where the workers reside. I would argue that “free trade” is the wrong lens through which to view offshoring. Instead, it is much more akin to virtual immigration. Suppose, for example, that a huge customer service call center were to be built south of San Diego, just across the border from Mexico. Thousands of low-wage workers are issued “day worker” passes and are bused across the border to staff the call center every morning. At the end of the workday, the buses travel in the opposite direction. What is the difference between this situation (which would certainly be viewed as an immigration issue) and moving the jobs electronically to India or the Philippines?

As technology advances, we can expect that more and more of the routine tasks now performed by offshore workers will eventually be handled entirely by machines. This has already occurred with respect to some call center workers who have been replaced by voice automation technology. As truly powerful natural language systems like IBM’s Watson move into the customer service arena, huge numbers of offshore call center jobs are poised to be vaporized. As this process unfolds, it seems likely that those companies—and nations—that have invested heavily in offshoring as a route to profitability and prosperity will have little choice but to move up the value chain.

The system would draw on product specifications, prices, and clinical studies and research to make specific and instant recommendations to doctors and procurement managers.24 Watson is also looking for a role in the financial industry, where the system may be poised to provide personalized financial advice by delving into a wealth of information about specific customers as well as general market and economic conditions. The deployment of Watson in customer service call centers is perhaps the area with the most disruptive near-term potential, and it is likely no coincidence that within a year of Watson’s triumph on Jeopardy!, IBM was already working with Citigroup to explore applications for the system in the company’s massive retail banking operation.25 IBM’s new technology is still in its infancy.


pages: 243 words: 61,237

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

What’s more, Grant’s research has shown that purpose is a performance enhancer not only in efforts like the promotion of hand washing and recycling, but also in traditional sales. In 2008, he carried out a fascinating study of a call center at a major U.S. university. Each night, employees made phone calls to alumni to raise money for the school. As is the habit of social psychologists, Grant randomly organized the fund-raisers into three groups. Then he arranged their work conditions to be identical—except for the five minutes prior to their shift. For two consecutive nights, one group read stories from people who’d previously worked in the call center, explaining that the job had taught them useful sales skills (perhaps attunement, buoyancy, and clarity).

Adam Grant is a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and one of America’s top young social psychologists. Some of his previous research had examined extraversion28 and he’d become curious that a trait so widely associated with sales didn’t have much connection to success in that realm. So he decided to find out why. Grant collected data from a software company that operates call centers to sell its products. He began by asking more than three hundred sales representatives to complete several personality assessments, including one that social scientists use to measure where people fall on the introversion-extraversion spectrum. This particular assessment lists statements such as “I am the life of the party” and “I am quiet around strangers” and asks participants to rate themselves on a 1-to-7 scale, with their answers resulting in a numerical measure of extraversion.

For two consecutive nights, one group read stories from people who’d previously worked in the call center, explaining that the job had taught them useful sales skills (perhaps attunement, buoyancy, and clarity). This was the “personal benefit group.” Another—the “purpose group”—read stories from university alumni who’d received scholarships funded by the money this call center had raised describing how those scholarships had helped them. The third collection of callers was the control group, who read stories that had nothing to do with either personal benefit or purpose. After the reading exercise, the workers hit the phones, admonished not to mention the stories they’d just read to the people they were trying to persuade to donate money. A few weeks later, Grant looked at their sales numbers.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

In early 2018 the retailer allowed more remote work because it was running out of space in some of its call centers. Emanuel and Harrington compared the call volume for workers who were allowed to work at home before and after they switched to remote work. They found that “at the time of the transition to remote work, hourly calls rose by 7.5%,” despite finding no change in the composition of calls. There was a reduction in unexcused absences, and little change in the ratings customers gave the workers for their calls. Similarly, when call-center workers were forced to go home because of COVID-19, productivity increased by 8 percent.

We noted earlier the finding of Emanuel and Harrington that remote working was associated with improved productivity in call centers. That holds up in randomized trials as well. Stanford economists Nicholas Bloom and John Roberts, along with colleagues in China, analyzed data from a Chinese travel agency that conducted an experiment with working at home. Among workers who were interested in remote work, the firm randomized some to work at home and some to continue coming to the office. The workers who were allowed to work from home were 13 percent more productive than the workers who had to commute. If call-center work is more productive at home, why did companies wait until COVID-19 to go remote?

For forty years, futurists like Alvin Toffler have argued that electronic interactions would make face-to-face meetings unnecessary and that would lead to massive out-migration from cities. For forty years, they were wrong. Then, suddenly, they were right. Has Zoom replaced the conference room? The evidence suggests disruption but not a hinge of history. Simple tasks, like working in a call center, can be done well remotely, but there is evidence that remote workers learn less than their in-person counterparts. Recent research suggests that the workers who sign up for remote jobs are less committed and productive than workers who want to be live. New hiring for remote jobs, including architects, aerospace engineers, and environmental scientists, had not recovered by the end of 2020, while new hiring for non-remote jobs, like painters, messengers, and stock clerks, had largely come back.


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

After his first few weeks, Piacentini called his wife back in Milan and told her not to pack their things for Seattle quite yet. But after Galli left, he grew more comfortable at Amazon. A year later, during the layoffs, he was tasked with closing Amazon’s new multilingual call center in The Hague. The facility had been poorly selected. The Hague was a financial and diplomatic hub, and the call center was incongruously located in a marble-floored building that had once been occupied by a bank. It never should have been opened in the first place, but “people at various levels were making decentralized decisions to move quickly and the process wasn’t strong,” Piacentini says.

Most recently, in 2013, workers at two Amazon FCs in Germany went on strike for four days, demanding better pay and benefits. The company refused to negotiate with the union. The unions themselves say there’s another hurdle involved—employees’ fear of retribution. In January 2001, the company closed a Seattle customer-service call center, as part of a larger round of cost-cutting measures. Amazon said closing the facility was unrelated to recent union activity there, but the union involved was not so sure. “The number one thing standing in the way of Amazon unionization is fear,” says Rennie Sawade, a spokesman for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers.

In the grip of the dot-com downturn, Hsieh simply refused to let Zappos die, putting in $1.5 million of his own money and selling off some of his personal assets to keep it afloat. He moved the company from San Francisco to Las Vegas to cut costs and to make it easier to find workers for its customer-service call center. In 2004, Hsieh attracted an investment from Sequoia Capital, the firm that had backed LinkExchange. Sequoia, which had rejected Zappos a few times before coming around, invested a total of $48 million in the startup across several rounds, and a partner, Michael Moritz, joined the board of directors.


pages: 233 words: 67,596

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris

always be closing, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, commoditize, data acquisition, digital map, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, if you build it, they will come, intangible asset, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knapsack problem, late fees, linear programming, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Netflix Prize, new economy, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, RFID, search inside the book, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply-chain management, text mining, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, traveling salesman, yield management

Once we have these drivers by product, activity, and channel, we can aggregate costs across all units to arrive at both transaction and total product cost. These costs are then available for use in profitability models. For example, we can report the full end-to-end product cost of residential mortgages including acquisition and renewal costs by channel, back office processing, call center support, system costs, Head Office and regional overheads. For every customer we can then arrive at the costs associated with “ownership” of each separate product in the customer’s portfolio, based on transaction usage and channel preference.11 While the math to compute activity-based costs isn’t that difficult, coming up with the needed data does require a substantial degree of diligent investigation.

Honda instituted an analytical “early warning” program to identify major potential quality issues from warranty service records. These records are sent to Honda by dealers, and they include both categorized quality problems and free text. Other text comes from transcripts of calls by mechanics to experts in various domains at headquarters and from customer calls to call centers. Honda’s primary concern was that any serious problems identified by dealers or customers would be noticed at headquarters and addressed quickly. So Honda analysts set up a system to mine the textual data coming from these different sources. Words appearing for the first time (particularly those suggesting major problems, such as fire) and words appearing more than predicted were flagged for human analysts to look at.

Health-ways uses data on members’ demographic, claims, prescription, and lab procedures to predict (using artificial intelligence neural network technology) which ones will be at highest risk for greater future total medical expenditures over the next year. Healthways employs more than fifteen-hundred registered nurses who then provide telephonic and direct mail interventions from one of its ten call centers nationwide to help members develop healthy behaviors which reduce the severity of the disease, improve outcomes, and reduce the cost to the health plan. This approach to risk management can also reduce ongoing health maintenance costs and lower the risk of disease recurrence.21 Other approaches to evidence-based health care involve developing appropriate treatment protocols for patients in health care facilities.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Much of the growth of the U.S. white-collar workforce after World War II was driven by the rapid spread of communications networks: telemarketers, telephone operators, and technical and sales support jobs all involved giving companies the infrastructure to connect customers with employees. Computerization transformed these occupations: call centers moved overseas and the first generation of automated switchboards replaced a good number of switchboard and telephone operators. Software companies like Nuance, the SRI spin-off that offers speaker-independent voice recognition, have begun to radically transform customer call centers and airline reservation systems. Despite consumers’ rejection of “voicemail hell,” system technology like My Cybertwin and Nuance will soon put at risk jobs that involve interacting with customers via the telephone.

However, today we are entering an era where humans can, with growing ease, be designed in or out of “the loop,” even in formerly high-status, high-income, white-collar professional areas. On one end of the spectrum smart robots can load and unload trucks. On the other end, software “robots” are replacing call center workers and office clerks, as well as transforming high-skill, high-status professions such as radiology. In the future, how will the line be drawn between man and machine, and who will draw it? Despite the growing debate over the consequences of the next generation of automation, there has been very little discussion about the designers and their values.

Together they built My Cybertwin into a business selling FAQbot technology to companies like banks and insurance companies. These bots would give website users relevant answers to their frequently asked questions about products and services. It proved to be a great way for companies to inexpensively offer personalized information to their customers, saving money by avoiding customer call center staffing and telephony costs. At the time, however, the technology was not yet mature. Though the company had some initial business success, My Cybertwin also had competitors, so Capper looked for ways to expand into new markets. They tried to turn My Cybertwin into a program that created a software avatar that would interact with other people over the Internet, even while its owner was offline.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Many modern jobs are transactional service jobs—that is, they feature people helping customers access what they need from complex business systems. But whether the customer is buying an airline ticket, ordering a meal, or making an appointment, these transactions are so routinized that they are simple to translate into code. You might well know someone—a bank teller, an airline reservations clerk, a call center representative—who lost his or her job to the new reality of computerized systems enabling self-service. At least, you feel the absence of them when you contact a company and encounter a machine interface. Just as Era One of automation continues to play out, so does Era Two. There is still plenty of work currently performed by humans that could be more cheaply and capably performed by machines—increasingly smart ones in particular.

Finally, we’d argue that, if the goal is to provide truly exceptional or differentiated products and services at scale, only an augmentation arrangement can accomplish that. We’re all familiar with completely automated customer service, and most of us have developed strategies for finding a human to talk to about our problem (you know—pressing zero or saying “agent”). The menu of call center information options often just doesn’t cut it. If you want your service to be high quality, or if you want your products to be differentiated from competitors, having computers churn out your processes is unlikely to do the job. When we talk about companies with high reputations in the marketplace, we seldom talk about their automation.

An example is the use of Blue Prism software by Britain’s Co-operative Bank. Traditionally, its employees have followed a typical process when a customer has called to report a lost or stolen credit card. Having gleaned the relevant information from the customer in a conversation lasting perhaps five minutes, the call center agent would spend twenty-five minutes interacting with a variety of different internal systems to cancel the existing card, enter notes on the account, provide for delivery of a new card, and so forth. By programming software to perform these rather mundane and repetitive tasks (investing in, as Bathgate calls it, robotic process automation), Co-operative Bank has enabled agents who were dealing with two lost-card incidents per hour to deal with perhaps a dozen.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

The world tends to change faster than bureaucracies can keep up, which causes problems for any organization that has lashed itself to an unbending framework of performance measures. Imagine a company with targets for resolving queries from customers who phone the call center, but no target for dealing with a problem using the Web. The target demands that resources should be funneled to the call center, when they might be better used on the website. Anyone who wants to improve will have to ignore the target. There are also two ways to sidestep a target completely: lying and cheating. It’s sometimes possible to lie—miss your target, but say you hit it—and that sounds bad enough.

Each chapter explores a different aspect of messiness, showing how it can spur creativity, nurture resilience, and generally bring out the best in us. That is true whether we are performing with a piano in front of a concert hall audience or a slide deck in front of a boardroom; whether we are running a corporation or manning a call center; whether we are commanding an army, dating, or trying to be a good parent. The success we admire is often built on messy foundations—even if those foundations are often hidden away. I will stand up for messiness not because I think messiness is the answer to all life’s problems, but because I think messiness has too few defenders.

A best man faced giving a wedding speech without proper footwear because the Zappos courier, UPS, had screwed up; on hearing his tale, a Zappos rep rushed him free shoes by express delivery. Another Zappos rep took a call from a customer who was staying in Las Vegas, not far from Zappos HQ. The customer was trying to get a pair of shoes that Zappos no longer stocked; the Zappos rep found them in stock at a rival retailer at a nearby shopping mall, left the call center, bought the shoes, and delivered them to the customer by hand.26 Zappos would soon be out of business if every customer received such treatment. But in each of these cases the customer was in an unusual situation: I’m returning my husband’s shoes because he just died; my shoes haven’t arrived and I am best man at a wedding tomorrow; I can’t get the shoes I want and I’m just a couple of miles from your office right now.


pages: 233 words: 71,342

Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire--And How It All Came Crashing Down... by Ben Mezrich

asset allocation, call centre, urban sprawl

And even though Scott had repeatedly explained that they weren’t interested in sports gambling, Eric had maintained that the sports books were the place to start. So again and again, Eric parked the Fiat in front of one of the nondescript warehouses or the low ranch houses and ushered the four of them inside. Each time the setup was the same. Cubicled call centers spread out across bland spaces—hell, if you walked into a call center at Hewlett-Packard or Cisco, you’d expect to see the same thing. Once they got into the back offices, they found that most of the operators behind the sports books were Americans, while the front-office staff was usually Costa Rican. But the most remarkable thing about the sports books—and the thing that they all seemed to have in common—was the seedy element at the top levels.

Poker, the way it was played in America, had been born in Mississippi in the Wild West era. But Scott intended to take it into the modern age, to turn it sophisticated, to make it as tempting and addictive packaged in electronic bits and bytes as it was on a felt table over a sawdust floor. Sports betting—that was a different business. It was call centers taking phone calls all day long; it was dirty, mobbed up, and illegal. Poker was sophisticated, young, and hip. To capture that, Scott knew the key was going to be the game itself—the software. Now that he had his core team, was on his way to finding financing, and knew where he was going to build his empire, the next step was to figure out how.

Which was why at the moment, Garin was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the area they’d designated as Customer Service. In front of him were a computer and a telephone. The 1-800 number that led to that phone had been inserted into the beta introduction page, so for the moment Garin was their call center, ready for action. “Okay, I guess it’s time,” Scott said. He signaled Hilt, who began to type into his computer, communicating with the server hosts at HostaRica, then with the Koreans, who would be monitoring the beta test as well. As Hilt had pointed out, it really was mostly friends and family—though they had also sent out notices through a few of the more public poker forums, advertising themselves in a decidedly grassroots manner.


pages: 403 words: 132,736

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Most British he disliked, he said apologetically, because of what they had done to India, because they always did things differently, like driving on the left and refusing to join European monetary union, and because they always acted so superior. “India will take the world to a higher plane,” he said. “Everybody should understand that—even the British.” I could not help liking him. • • • Powerful new images have emerged of India in the last ten or so years, fed mostly by its success in information technology and offshore call centers, the growing reach of Bollywood abroad—popularized in part by the increasing wealth and visibility of Indian communities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere—and by India’s much-analyzed nuclear weapons program, which was first openly declared in 1998. In the same way that viewing India through a purely religious lens often distorts one’s view of the country—and can lead to a basic misreading of what is happening—these new images can also mislead.

And when I asked him whether this work is intellectually challenging enough for him, Alok replied: “Wow! That is an awesome question!” He never really answered it. Yet the world of which Alok is a part (admittedly a relatively privileged part)—of the Internet, of information technology, of software maintenance, and of call centers, back-office processing units, and research and development hubs—is in other respects very serious. The success of India’s IT companies in attracting ever more impressive flows of offshore business from the United States and Europe has reverberations way beyond the air-conditioned offices of IT companies in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, or Mumbai.

During my time in India I have often been amused by the foreign executives I have met who spend years occupying the same hotel rooms while they await the green light for their company to invest in India so that they can set up a permanent office. The fact that they are prepared to wait so long is an indication of how important the Indian market is to the global strategy of most U.S. and European corporations. In 2005 GE, which kick-started India’s offshore boom in the late 1980s when it set up its first Indian call center near Delhi, launched an Indian bank. GE said it anticipated “indefinite” double-digit growth in the Indian banking market over the coming decades. No one blinked. The fact that India has so far to travel makes it an especially attractive long-term prospect to many foreign investors. In Alok—and the many entrepreneurs like him in booming urban India—the global multinationals have an energetic ally.


pages: 436 words: 141,321

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, different worldview, driverless car, Easter island, failed state, fulfillment center, future of work, hiring and firing, holacracy, index card, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, radical decentralization, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the market place, the scientific method, Tony Hsieh, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

Piece by piece, the Achievement-Orange logic grew deeper roots. Tasks were specialized: some people would take care of intake of new patients and determine how nurses would best serve them; planners were hired to provide nurses with a daily schedule, optimizing the route from patient to patient; call center employees started taking patients’ calls; given the growing size of the organizations, regional managers and directors were appointed as bosses to supervise the nurses in the field. To ensure accurate planning and drive up efficiency, time norms were established for each type of intervention: in one company, for instance, intravenous injections would be allotted exactly 10 minutes, bathing 15 minutes, wound dressing 10 minutes, and changing a compression stocking 2.5 minutes.

The responsibility lies with the teams and Jos [de Blok, the founder].32 Coaches have no hierarchical power, but make no mistake, they play a crucial role just the same. Self-management is no walk in the park. Newer teams in particular face a steep learning curve. They are effectively in charge of all the aspects of creating and running a small organization of 12 people (remember, there are no intakers, no planners, no call center operators, no administrators, no managers), and at the same time they are learning to manage interpersonal dynamics within a self-organizing, boss-less team. The regional coach is a precious resource to the teams; upon request she can give advice or share how other teams have solved similar problems.

At Buurtzorg, for example, the 7,000 nurses are supported by only 30 people working from a humble building in a residential part of Almelo, a town in the northern Netherlands—a far cry from the headquarters building you might expect for such a successful company. None of them are involved in the typical headquarters functions of nursing companies (intake, planning, call center). Buurtzorg has incredibly motivated employees (it is regularly elected “best company to work for” in the country) but, like many other Teal Organizations, it has no human resources department. People working at headquarters have a strong ethos of service to the teams of nurses—their duty is to support nurses with the same dedication and responsiveness that the nurses bring to their patients.


pages: 540 words: 103,101

Building Microservices by Sam Newman

airport security, Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, business logic, business process, call centre, continuous integration, Conway's law, create, read, update, delete, defense in depth, don't repeat yourself, Edward Snowden, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, index card, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, job automation, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, platform as a service, premature optimization, pull request, recommendation engine, Salesforce, SimCity, social graph, software as a service, source of truth, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, the built environment, the long tail, two-pizza team, web application, WebSocket

More likely, we’ll have different roles at work. For example, a principal in the CALL_CENTER group might be allowed to view any piece of information about a customer except his payment details. The principal might also be able to issue refunds, but that amount might be capped. Someone who has the CALL_CENTER_TEAM_LEADER role, however, might be able to issue larger refunds. These decisions need to be local to the microservice in question. I have seen people use the various attributes supplied by identity providers in horrible ways, using really fine-grained roles like CALL_CENTER_50_DOLLAR_REFUND, where they end up putting information specific to one part of one of our system’s behavior into their directory services.

And if they want to change it, they reach into the database! This is really simple when you first think about it, and is probably the fastest form of integration to start with — which probably explains its popularity. Figure 4-1 shows our registration UI, which creates customers by performing SQL operations directly on the database. It also shows our call center application that views and edits customer data by running SQL on the database. And the warehouse updates information about customer orders by querying the database. This is a common enough pattern, but it’s one fraught with difficulties. Figure 4-1. Using DB integration to access and change customer information First, we are allowing external parties to view and bind to internal implementation details.

There is going to be logic associated with how a customer is changed. Where is that logic? If consumers are directly manipulating the DB, then they have to own the associated logic. The logic to perform the same sorts of manipulation to a customer may now be spread among multiple consumers. If the warehouse, registration UI, and call center UI all need to edit customer information, I need to fix a bug or change the behavior in three different places, and deploy those changes too. Goodbye, cohesion. Remember when we talked about the core principles behind good microservices? Strong cohesion and loose coupling — with database integration, we lose both things.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Yang, who already entered the 2020 presidential race, argues that the US needs radically new policies to prevent mass unemployment and a violent backlash. “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society . . . That one innovation will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”3 Yang is—as New York Times writer Kevin Roose puts it—“a longer-than-long shot” presidential candidate, but his themes are likely to be taken up by more electable candidates. “If we don’t change things dramatically,” Yang says in his “Andrew Yang for President” video, children will grow up in a country with “fewer and fewer opportunities and a handful of companies and individuals reaping the gains from the new technologies while the rest of us struggle to find opportunities and lose our jobs.”

In the 2000s, Blinder became passionately concerned by the possibility that advancing information technology—what today we call digital technology—could lead to the loss of US jobs due to offshoring. What he had in mind is reverse telemigration. Instead of foreign workers working virtually in our offices, he was concerned that “our” work would be sent to foreign offices. And in many areas like call centers, and back-office processing, that is exactly what happened. As part of his effort to raise the alarm, he developed a ranking of how “offshorable” each US occupations was. His ranking was based on two criteria. If the job had to be done at a specific location in America, then it could not be displaced by foreign competition.

A “massive employment crisis is already underway. . . . Artificial intelligence, robotics, and software are about to replace millions of workers. This is no longer speculative—it is already happening.” There is, he asserts, a very real threat facing tens of millions of Americans, everyone from truck drivers and lawyers to call center workers and accountants. He predicts a violent backlash. “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society. We’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work. That one innovation will be enough to create riots in the streets.” Yang embraces the standard stance of populist-as-outsider.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

One of the best examples of all three revolutions simultaneously at work is the Indian outsourcing industry. Young, educated Indians who belong to the country’s burgeoning middle class have flocked to work at urban call centers and other business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, which in 2011 generated $59 billion in revenue and directly and indirectly employed almost 10 million Indians.39 As Shehzad Nadeem observed in Dead Ringers, his study of the impact of Indian call centers on their workers, “The identities and aspirations of the ICT [information and communications technology] workforce are defined increasingly with reference to the West. . . .

Radical in their rejection of old values, conspicuous in their consumption, workers construct an image of the West that is used to benchmark India’s progress toward modernity.”40 Although the jobs pay relatively well, they plunge young Indians into a welter of contradictions and competing aspirations—that is, aspirations to succeed in an Indian social and economic context while sublimating their cultural identities with fake accents and names and dealing with abuse and exploitation at the hands of affluent customers in a different continent. For young urban Indian women in particular, the jobs have provided opportunities and economic benefits that they might otherwise not have had, leading to lasting changes in behavior that are upending cultural norms. Never mind the lurid newspaper article that talked about call centers as “a part of India where freedom knows no bounds, love is a favourite pastime, and sex is recreation.” Closer to the mark would be a recent survey by India’s Associated Chambers of Commerce that young working married women in Indian cities are increasingly choosing to put off having children in favor of developing their careers.41 REVOLUTIONARY CONSEQUENCES: UNDERMINING THE BARRIERS TO POWER Plenty of events would seem to suggest that things have not changed all that much, that micropowers are an anomaly, and, ultimately, that big power can and will continue to call the shots.

Consider the activities encompassed under the rubric of “outsourcing.” At first, this simply meant contracting with outside vendors for materials or sending goods away for assembly or some other phase in the manufacturing chain. Then outsourcing spread to services—initially, the lower-skilled services like basic accounting or call centers for fielding basic customer issues. But now, the scope of outsourcing extends to telemedicine—doctors who issue diagnoses or laboratory experts who process tests or accountants in India who file tax returns for US companies. A constellation of small firms whose geographic location is an increasingly less relevant factor turns out to be capable of delivering specialty and knowledge-intensive services at lower cost but equal quality to the in-house shops painstakingly cultivated by the old industry giants.


pages: 381 words: 112,674

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

Beirne added more details about what they saw on their visit: “Watching this girl on the phone in their mini­call center—the ability to do the McDonald’s ‘So would you like fries with that?’—the ability to add on to someone’s bill—‘Yes, yes, yes, yes’—the next thing you know, you’ve got a twenty-dollar order and away you go, and ‘I just called for milk!’ She gets an order, she just flew.” The woman in the call center worked by prompts from the system. “Barely spoke English, but didn’t need to. I’m serious. It’s so cool.” At Beirne’s mention that the call-center people probably didn’t earn more than the minimum wage, Kagle broke in: “This is an entrepreneurial company, and a lot of this has been done without a lot of capital, so there’s a big need to professionalize it.”

It was the first to go public—but then the stock sank. It appeared that the brightest star of the early batch would be the eleventh investment, in Genesys Telecommunications Labs, one of Bruce Dunlevie’s companies, which made software for routing telephone calls from customers in large corporate call centers. The collective value of a typical venture capital portfolio will go down before it goes up—the pattern is called the J curve—because the companies that are not going to survive die before the best performers begin to shine and pull the value of the portfolio up with them. That, at least, had been the pattern in the past.

Beirne had a sudden thought: Would there be a way, he wondered aloud, of starting a companion business that would provide scheduled home delivery for Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and other e-tailers? “Amazon is not going to be your partner in this,” Dunlevie said. “But they may,” Beirne insisted. “Amazon to your door? They can’t do Amazon to your door.” “Amazon to my door is the way it works now.” “But not delivered by someone that represents the company with a call center that’s handled by the company, that handles all your returns, scheduled delivery.” “I’m not buying it. I’m just not buying it. I have yet to return anything to Amazon. They do order consolidation. And they deliver it when I’m not there, which is the way I want it.” “You’ve got to be a top one percent user of Amazon, probably,” Beirne said.


pages: 189 words: 52,741

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World by Jesse Krieger

Airbnb, always be closing, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, do what you love, drop ship, financial independence, follow your passion, income inequality, independent contractor, iterative process, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, search engine result page, Skype, software as a service, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, warehouse automation

Now it’s possible to hire, manage and coordinate teams of specialists in different countries and time zones via online platforms that enable a wide array of business functions. With little more than well-defined job requirements, you can connect with service providers around the world to act as virtual departments within your business. This goes well beyond simply “outsourcing a call center”, as that assumes there was a domestic call center beforehand… What we are interested in here is taking advantage of the 21st century Internet economy to design new business models. There is something innately fun in doing business this way and as a by-product you come to learn a little about different cultures and geographies as well as who specializes in what, and where.

USB Superstore has two clear calls-to-action on their homepage: 1) Submit a quote request 2) Call a toll-free number The primary focus is to drive sales In many cases, you can type the script that the listener will hear directly into the IVR along with the numbers to route calls to. If no one is available, the caller can leave a message, which is then sent as an mp3 audio file, via email, to the appropriate person. The recipient can listen to the audio file right from their workstation and call back when time permits. Although we’ve all had at least one frustrating call center experience, they are very efficient from a business owner’s perspective and can be very clear and succinct. The goal here is not to give potential customers the runaround via automated voice menus, but rather to get them in touch with the Sales Team as quickly as possible. Having a toll-free number and an IVR lends an aura of legitimacy to your business, even if the calls are being routed to your home phone line in the early stages.


pages: 220

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, credit crunch, David Heinemeier Hansson, Elon Musk, fail fast, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, web application

These web-based businesses wanted to have a relationship with their customers, but they didn’t have the right tools for reaching them. The existing world of customer service systems was all call center–based and telephony oriented. Everything was done on the phone. But this new generation of companies did not conduct the majority of their interactions on the phone. They didn’t want to outsource to a call center and bury customers there. They wanted to chat with them where they lived—on the Web—or get in touch with them by email, but the then-current generation of software just wasn’t built to do that.

Our first focus was on the product—and 39 Page 39 Svane c02.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 8:23 P.M. S TA R TU P L A N D on thinking about how to do it differently. All we knew was that it had to be lean and elegant. Curiously enough, we didn’t think about much else—even the basics that would have been in an instruction manual. (There was no instruction manual!) We never thought about “call center systems.” We never thought about a “target market.” We never thought about competition. All we thought about was trying a different approach to existing customer service software. There was no business plan. There was no plan. For a long time, we didn’t have a name for our project. Morten had originally baptized it “Project Eisenhut,” which is German for Iron Hat.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

While China resists such maneuvers, it also knows that the only way to neutralize Australia’s alliance with America is to make it a supply chain ally. Tug-of-war is just as fierce higher up the value chain. The Eastwood City Cyberpark in Manila is home to a bustling high-rise cluster of offices with thirty thousand call center workers varying their shifts by the global time zone they serve—much the same way as the Indian call center workers in Bangalore used to do before the Filipinos took their business. The intense competition among circuit nodes is a reminder that the global economy shapes how we work more than geography or daylight. The former Citicorp CEO Walter Wriston once wrote, “Time zones matter more than borders,”5 and indeed some economists have recently proposed that the United States reduce to just two time zones.6 If horizontal tug-of-war is resource mercantilism, then vertical tug-of-war is innovation mercantilism: grabbing the most technologically sophisticated and financially profitable segments of strategic industries.

With Chinese-built infrastructure, Sri Lanka has already made big gains in tourism and exports of textiles, garments, and tea. Now India can leverage China’s infrastructure to more efficiently deliver its own projects for Sri Lanka, from railways to housing, and use the island as a reliable back office and outsourcing site for call centers and car part assembly for the huge south Indian market of 300 million people. The Indian Ocean is once again the epicenter of competitive connectivity. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, India’s coastal kingdoms haggled with European colonial merchants to get the most favorable terms for carrying their goods to far-off markets.

Investors are willing to go into SEZs for low-cost labor and protection from regulatory hassles, while governments need foreign investment to create jobs and train workers, import technology and skills, and provide a demonstration effect for the rest of the economy. So far, it has proven to be a win-win combination: Sacrifice some sovereignty in order to become a productive member of the supply chain world. In the 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of industrial parks and technology clusters that focused on higher-value areas such as call centers, software programming, and logistics management emerged in both developed and developing countries. Their role models were America’s already established Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (which also became a foreign trade zone in the 1980s). Bangalore and Hyderabad, today India’s IT jewels, benefited from diaspora talent, investment from multinationals such as Texas Instruments, and support from a new agency called Software Technology Parks of India.


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

“The Hidden Costs of IT Outsourcing.” MIT Sloan Management Review 42, no. 3: 60–69. Batt, Rosemary, David Holman, and Ursula Holtgrewe. 2009. “The Globalization of Service Work: Comparative Institutional Perspectives on Call Centers.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 62, no. 4: 453–487. Batt, Rosemary, and Hiroatsu Nohara. 2009. “How Institutions and Business Strategies Affect Wages: A Cross National Study of Call Centers.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 62, no. 4: 533–552. Bebchuk, Lucian, and Jesse Fried. 2004. Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

This strategy led companies to focus their key strategies and attention on the development of brands and strong customer identification with the company’s goods or services; on building the capacity to introduce new products or designs; or on implementing true economies of scale or scope in production and operation. Activities outside of this core were shifted away. As a result, companies outsourced customer relations to third-party call centers; manufacturers shifted production to networks of subcontractors for subassemblies; and private, public, and nonprofit organizations contracted out everything from cleaning and janitorial services to payroll and human resource functions. Shedding Employment By focusing on core competencies, lead businesses in the economy have shed the employment relationship for many activities, and all that comes with it.

The same technologic and information systems that made outsourcing possible, combined with the reduction of many international trade restrictions, such as quotas and tariffs, enabled offshoring to expand rapidly as a source of intermediate products for manufacturers or as a source for more and more final products for retailers.22 In more recent years, digital technologies and the growth of higher-level skills in India, China, and elsewhere led to similar offshoring in service industries—in areas ranging from call centers to software engineering. Outsourcing and offshoring have also been a growing topic of popular debate in the past decade and featured prominently in the presidential campaign of 2012. Offshoring has drawn particular attention because of its perceived impacts on wages and employment of U.S. workers directly affected by it.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

A customer with a question about a product—delivery time, the color, shipping, a return—had to disconnect from the Internet to use the phone to call customer service. Rosenzweig and PeopleSupport co-founder David Nash created the first outsourced chat service for online retailers. They opened a call center in Los Angeles and ran offbeat recruitment ads, such as “I dare you to send us your résumé. Hell, we’re only the hottest dot-com start-up in town,” and “Stock options are better than a knee to the shorts.” The call center was located in Westwood, Los Angeles, and most of their employees were UCLA students or graduates. Dot-com companies signed up in droves to outsource their customer support, sending their own employees to Westwood to train the PeopleSupport team.

Stamm eventually acknowledged that he was the idea, engineering, and start-up guy. As his company grew to more than five hundred employees, he realized he was out of his element as a manager. MJ found it refreshing to have a founder who was aware of his limitations. Under Zingale, Clarify evolved from doing one thing—call center automation—to offering various products for customer service, including marketing, analytics, sales, and support. It became a platform of services, allowing companies to modify the interface by adding fields, tables, screens, and other tools. By the late 1990s, Zingale and Stamm had learned to work well together, and Clarify had become a hot property.

THERESIA Theresia had an idea for a new category of investing, one that related to a few of her favorite things: shopping, travel, and real estate. Having landed the WebCohort/Imperva deal, and with her investment in PeopleSupport rising from the ashes and now showing amazing growth after moving its call center operations to the Philippines, she was on the trail of what she believed would be the next great investment opportunity for Accel. Her “proactive investment thesis,” as she called it, came from watching Google grow into the most popular way to search the Web. In 2003 Google earned $106 million on sales of nearly $1 billion.


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

Hardly a week goes by without a major American employer announcing a round of layoffs as part of a new “restructuring plan” designed to “improve profitability.” American Express was flush with cash in 2015, but ordered a round of layoffs in a bid to quickly boost its profit margins and stock price. It didn’t work—AmEx stock slid some more and stayed down for the following two years. Sprint was minting money in 2016 but slashed thousands of call center jobs to reduce expenses, a move that simultaneously wreaked havoc on workers and led to inferior customer service. Offshoring continues, too. Carrier, the air-conditioning company, sent jobs to Mexico in 2017 even after President Trump intervened. And Nabisco, AT&T, and Brooks Brothers all shifted jobs overseas in recent years.

“We found urgent requests for help were increasingly the result of everyday events, like an unexpectedly steep medical bill, a student loan payment, or a car breaking down,” Schulman said. The next year, PayPal decided to survey its low-paid and entry-level employees, a group that included many men and women working in call centers, and which accounted for about half the company’s workforce. Schulman went into the exercise with high hopes. “Honestly I was doing it because I thought the results that would come back were going to be really good, because PayPal is a tech company, and we pay at or above market rates everywhere around the world because we want to attract really great employees,” he said.

“Honestly I was doing it because I thought the results that would come back were going to be really good, because PayPal is a tech company, and we pay at or above market rates everywhere around the world because we want to attract really great employees,” he said. That was not the case. Two thirds of respondents said they were running short on cash between paychecks. “We got the survey results back and I was actually shocked to see that our hourly workers—like our call center employees, our entry-level employees—were just like the rest of the market, struggling to make ends meet.” Schulman was stunned. “What it told me is that for about half our employees, the market wasn’t working. Capitalism wasn’t working.” At one of the most profitable companies in the world, more than 10,000 employees were barely making enough to survive.


pages: 351 words: 123,876

Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software (Theory in Practice) by Adam Goucher, Tim Riley

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business logic, call centre, continuous integration, Debian, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Grace Hopper, index card, Isaac Newton, natural language processing, off-by-one error, p-value, performance metric, revision control, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, SQL injection, the scientific method, Therac-25, Valgrind, web application

It’s Too Slow; We Hate It With the random 4s issue resolved, it was time for the real testing to begin: user acceptance testing (UAT). On some projects, UAT is little more than a formality, but on this project (and all of the projects I’ve worked on since dealing with call-center support software), UAT was central to go-live decisions. To that point, Susan, a call-center shift manager and UAT lead for this project, had veto authority over any decision about what was released into production and when. The feature aspects of UAT went as expected. There were some minor revisions to be made, but nothing unreasonable or overly difficult to implement.

COLLABORATION IS THE CORNERSTONE OF BEAUTIFUL PERFORMANCE TESTING 47 It Can’t Be the Network As it turned out, the eVersity project was canceled before the application made it into production (and by canceled, I mean that client just called one day to tell us that their entire division had been eliminated), so we never got a chance to see how accurate our performance testing had been. On the bright side, it meant that the team was available for the client-server to Web call-center conversion project that showed up a couple of weeks later. The first several months of the project were uneventful from a performance testing perspective. Sam and the rest of the developers kept me in the loop from the beginning. Jim, the client VP who commissioned the project, used to be a mainframe developer who specialized in performance, so we didn’t have any trouble with the contract or deliverables definitions related to performance, and the historical system usage was already documented for us.

There were some minor revisions to be made, but nothing unreasonable or overly difficult to implement. The feedback that had us all confused and concerned was that every single user acceptance tester mentioned—with greater or lesser vehemence—something about the application being “slow” or “taking too long.” Obviously we were concerned, because there is nothing that makes a call-center representative’s day worse than having to listen to frustrated customers’ colorful epithets when told, “Thank you for your patience, our system is a little slow today.” We were confused because the website was fast, especially over the corporate network, and each UAT team was comprised of 5 representatives taking 10 simulated calls each, or about 100 calls per hour.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

Where honest illusions add joy into the world, dishonest ones are intentionally aimed toward convincing people their worlds are a tawdry and miserable sort of place. Similarly, I received a very large number of testimonies from call center employees. None considered his or her job bullshit because of conditions of employment—actually, these appear to vary enormously, from nightmarish levels of surveillance to surprisingly relaxed—but because the work involved tricking or pressuring people into doing things that weren’t really in their best interest. Here’s a sampling: • “I had a bunch of bullshit call center jobs selling things that people didn’t really want/need, taking insurance claims, conducting pointless market research

I called people up to hock them useless shit they didn’t need: specifically, access to their ‘credit score’ that they could obtain for free elsewhere, but that we were offering (with some mindless add-ons) for £6.99 a month.” • “Most of the support covered basic computer operations the customer could easily google. They were geared toward old people or those that didn’t know better, I think.” • “Our call center’s resources are almost wholly devoted to coaching agents on how to talk people into things they don’t need as opposed to solving the real problems they are calling about.” So once again, what really irks is (1) the aggression and (2) the deception. Here I can speak from personal experience, having done such jobs, albeit usually very, very briefly: there are few things less pleasant than being forced against your better nature to try to convince others to do things that defy their common sense.

This is, incidentally, a particularly British variation of rights-scolding (though it increasingly infects the rest of Europe): older people who grew up with cradle-to-grave welfare state protections mocking young people for thinking they might be entitled to the same thing. There was also another factor, much though Rachel was slightly embarrassed to admit it: the position paid extremely well; more than either of her parents was making. For someone who’d spent her entire adult existence as a penniless student supporting herself through temping, call center, and catering jobs, it would be refreshing to finally get a taste of bourgeois life. Rachel: I’d done the “office thing” and the “crap job thing,” so how bad could a crap office job be, really? I had no concept of the bottom-of-the-ocean black depths of boredom I would sink to under a bulk of bureaucracy, terrible management, and myriad bullshit tasks.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Keith Naughton and Spencer Soper, “Alexa, Take the Wheel: Ford Models to Put Amazon in Driver Seat,” Bloomberg.com, January 5, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/steering-wheel-shopping-arrives-as-alexa-hitches-ride-with-ford; Ryan Knutson and Laura Stevens, “Amazon and Google Consider Turning Smart Speakers into Home Phones,” Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-google-dial-up-plans-to-turn-smart-speakers-into-home-phones-1487154781; Kevin McLaughlin, “AWS Takes Aim at Call Center Industry,” Information, February 28, 2017, https://www.theinformation.com/aws-takes-aim-at-call-center-industry. 45. Lucas Matney, “Siri-Creator Shows Off First Public Demo of Viv, ‘The Intelligent Interface for Everything,’” TechCrunch, http://social.techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-first-public-demo-of-viv-the-intelligent-interface-for-everything. 46.

“Social Media Analytics,” Xerox Research Center Europe, April 3, 2017, http://www.xrce.xerox.com/Our-Research/Natural-Language-Processing/Social-Media-Analytics; Amy Webb, “8 Tech Trends to Watch in 2016,” Harvard Business Review, December 8, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/12/8-tech-trends-to-watch-in-2016; Christina Crowell, “Machines That Talk to Us May Soon Sense Our Feelings, Too,” Scientific American, June 24, 2016, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/machines-that-talk-to-us-may-soon-sense-our-feelings-too; R. G. Conlee, “How Automation and Analytics Are Changing Customer Care,” Conduent Blog, July 18, 2016, https://www.blogs.conduent.com/2016/07/18/how-automation-and-analytics-are-changing-customer-care; Ryan Knutson, “Call Centers May Know a Surprising Amount About You,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2017, http://www.wsj.com/articles/that-anonymous-voice-at-the-call-center-they-may-know-a-lot-about-you-1483698608. 74. Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim, “Bold Promises Fade to Doubts for a Trump-Linked Data Firm,” New York Times, March 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-analytica.html; Mary-Ann Russon, “Political Revolution: How Big Data Won the US Presidency for Donald Trump,” International Business Times UK, January 20, 2017, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/political-revolution-how-big-data-won-us-presidency-donald-trump-1602269; Grassegger and Krogerus, “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down”; Carole Cadwalladr, “Revealed: How US Billionaire Helped to Back Brexit,” Guardian, February 25, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit; Paul-Olivier Dehaye, “The (Dis)Information Mercenaries Now Controlling Trump’s Databases,” Medium, January 3, 2017, https://medium.com/personaldata-io/the-dis-information-mercenaries-now-controlling-trumps-databases-4f6a20d4f3e7; Harry Davies, “Ted Cruz Using Firm That Harvested Data on Millions of Unwitting Facebook Users,” Guardian, December 11, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data. 75.

Alexa is ready with restaurant recommendations or advice on where to get your tires checked. “As pervasive as possible” explains why Amazon wants its Echo/Alexa device to also function as a home phone, able to make and receive calls; why it inked an agreement to install Echo in the nearly 5,000 rooms of the Wynn resort in Las Vegas; and why it is selling Alexa to call centers to automate the process of responding to live questions from customers by phone and text.44 Each expansion of Alexa’s territory increases the volume of voice surplus accrued to Amazon’s servers and fed to Alexa. The path to the coronation of the One Voice is not an easy one, and there are other travelers determined to elbow their way to the finish line.


Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting by Ashutosh Deshmukh

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AltaVista, book value, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, currency risk, data acquisition, disinformation, dumpster diving, fixed income, hypertext link, information security, interest rate swap, inventory management, iterative process, late fees, machine readable, money market fund, new economy, New Journalism, optical character recognition, packet switching, performance metric, profit maximization, semantic web, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply chain finance, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, warehouse automation, web application, Y2K

There is an endless debate about what these terms mean, and different definitions and interpretations are offered by vendors, consultants and academicians. The explanations provided here use commonly accepted definitions and provide general understanding of the terms. CRM integrates customer-centric efforts such as marketing campaigns, call centers, help desks, sales force automation and customer analytics (such as most profitable customers). SRM and SCM handle managing sourcing of raw materials, production, inventory and logistics; additionally, these also improve collaboration with suppliers, manage risk and analyze supplier profitability.

The Evolution of Accounting Software 39 • Ability to view billing and payment information, purchases and returns chronologically, by order or by item • Drill-down capabilities • Chat facilities with sales people Credit Approval • Web-based credit check and credit approvals • Automatic credit check and approval • Automatic credit card validation • Ability to check on established credit limit Billing and Collections • E-mail invoicing • Electronic bill presentment • Ability to handle multi-format payments; for example, letters of credit, bills of exchange, electronic fund transfers, credit cards, digital cash and so forth Services • Capability to create and track service request • Ability to integrate call centers and e-mail requests with back-end office processing • Access to company knowledge bases • Real-time information on orders, shipping and payment information • Ability to create collaborative platforms or forums • Online technical support Expenditure and Conversion Cycles EDI • Integrated EDI solution – electronically sends and receives purchase orders and payments • Can handle various EDI standards • EDI solution pre-mapped to each trading partner’s standards • Links to third-party translators and mapping software applications • Interfaces with EDI and fax software • Bar code interface Copyright © 2006, Idea Group Inc.

Tools such as paper-based records, telephone interviews, focus groups and marketing surveys have been used for CRM purposes. The advent of the Internet, data warehouses and data mining technologies offer more sophisticated ways to manage the customer relationship process. The objectives of CRM include improving customer service, increasing efficiency and effectiveness of call centers and marketing channels, cross selling of products, discovering new customers and improving profitability of existing customers. Copyright © 2006, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. The Revenue Cycle 135 CRM endeavors to focus disparate pieces of information such as customer behavior, customer demographic and financial data, sales and marketing, channel effectiveness, and service and support functions to establish a better relationship with the customer.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Using speech recognition technology and natural language processing, a company called Clinc is now developing a new AI voice assistant to be used in drive-through windows of fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and Taco Bell.18 And in 2018, Google announced that it is building AI technology to replace workers in call centers. Virtual agents will answer the phone when a customer calls. If a customer request involves something the algorithm cannot yet do, he or she will automatically be rerouted to a human agent. Another algorithm then analyzes these conversations to identify patterns in the data, which in turn helps improve the capabilities of the virtual agent.19 As the technology evolves, its effects on the labor market could be significant. Despite decades of companies’ moving jobs offshore, roughly 2.2 million Americans still work in 6,800 call centers across the country, and several hundred thousand do similar jobs in smaller sites.20 * * * One of the greatest leaps forward has taken place in autonomous driving.

Burns, 2018, “Clinc Is Building a Voice AI System to Replace Humans in Drive-Through Restaurants,” TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/video/clinc-is-building-a-voice-ai-system-to-replace-humans-in-drive-through-restaurants/. 19. D. Gershgorn, 2018, “Google Is Building ‘Virtual Agents’ to Handle Call Centers’ Grunt Work,” Quartz, July 24, https://qz.com/1335348/google-is-building-virtual-agents-to-handle-call-centers-grunt-work/. 20. Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson, forthcoming, “Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox.” 21. See C. B. Frey and M. A. Osborne, 2017, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?

The disruptive force of technology, Yang fears, could cause another wave of Luddite uprisings: “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society.… [W]e’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college. That one innovation will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”8 The point is not fatalism or pessimism. And it is surely not that we would be better off slowing down the pace of progress or restricting automation. The Industrial Revolution was the beginning of an unprecedented transformation that benefited everyone over the long run.


pages: 592 words: 133,460

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

The glittering glass tower forms a marked contrast to the appearance of the rest of the city. The tower houses call centers rented out to businesses by the owner, Yusuf Amdani, the president of Grupo Karim’s, a major presence in textiles and real estate in Honduras. A young Honduran like Allan could spend his entire life within Amdani’s suzerainty. Indeed, Allan almost had. Amdani owns UNITEC, Allan’s alma mater, which gives a discount to students who work in the call centers of the tower he also owns. Students and call center workers on their lunch break can shop at Altera, a mall within the Smart City, also owned by Amdani.

At the high end, minimum wage paid $465 a month, at the low end $263. Many of these workers have three to four kids. And besides, he said, it was only the really big companies that actually paid the legal minimum wage. The only other job his college degree could get him in Honduras, Allan said, was work in a call center, but that work paid $500 a month at most. Unless, he said bitterly, you were the president of the Central Bank of Honduras, Rina María Oliva Brizzio, daughter of the president of Congress, who makes $8,300 a month even without a degree in finance. I asked if his parents were going to be sad to be so far from Allan’s daughter, who is three.

Students and call center workers on their lunch break can shop at Altera, a mall within the Smart City, also owned by Amdani. When they graduate, they can find full-time work at the call centers, or in one of his many manufacturing facilities in Choloma. There, his holdings include spinning mills, fabric plants, and garment factories. Past the Altia tower, Yusuf Amdani’s own house is easily recognizable from a distance because it is built higher up in the hills than any other structure in the city, set flagrantly above the line above which it is technically illegal to build. I stopped at the tower on my way to the major port in San Pedro Sula. With the help of my translator, Gustavo, I explained to the receptionist at the Honduran Manufacturers Association that I was writing a book and needed access to the port to understand how export processing zones helped the Honduran economy.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

Because of this, dozens of companies are entering the space, focusing not only on facial information but on the other ways we engage the world emotionally. Tel Aviv–based Beyond Verbal is an emotions analytics company that extracts and identifies feelings conveyed by intonations in the human voice. Its initial primary application was for use in call centers and other customer services in order to read and understand consumer emotions and sentiment on the spot. Today they are expanding into other markets, specifically wellness and health.9 Based on over twenty-one years of research by physicists and neural psychologists, the company’s systems have been trained using more than 1.6 million voice samples from people in 174 countries.

The samples are each analyzed by three psychologists who must agree on the emotions being conveyed in order to be added into the training database. According to the company, the software can not only detect a caller’s primary and secondary moods but also certain aspects about their attitudes and personalities. All of this can be used to guide automated systems and customer service agents in how best to meet the customer’s needs. Call centers can use it in different ways to better respond to situations. For instance, there are different strategies for dealing with frustrated customers genuinely seeking a solution versus those who just want to voice their frustration. Beyond Verbal’s technology uses deep learning and pattern recognition techniques to extract the emotional content from voice waveforms.

Looking at comments from some of the industry’s leading players, we can ascertain what they themselves anticipate or want to see happen in the future. As mentioned earlier, Yuval Mor of Beyond Verbal thinks emotions analytics software will soon be available on virtually every voice-enabled platform. This would mean that software agents like Siri or call centers on the other side of the world would be able to judge your mood and frame of mind in the instant you interacted with them. Additionally, your phone calls to friends would be able to offer the option of including an emotion channel, above and beyond what was already being conveyed naturally. Presumably, in the interest of personal privacy, each of these will offer the ability to opt out if you so desire.


pages: 344 words: 96,690

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

business process, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, demand response, Donald Trump, estate planning, Firefox, folksonomy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, off-the-grid, Parler "social media", Salesforce, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, social bookmarking, social intelligence, Streisand effect, the long tail, Tony Hsieh

Once you buy a typical consumer product, the company doesn’t want to hear from you. If you call, it means something is going wrong. An average call to a company’s call center costs $6 or $7 when you include all the costs, according to Elizabeth Herrell, Forrester’s expert on contact centers. Technical support calls cost around twice that: $10 to $20. This adds up. Companies that do telephone support spend billions of dollars to run those call centers. The quest to reduce those support costs has driven two of the huge trends in corporate America in the past ten years. First, starting in the late 1990s, companies recognized they could send people to their Web sites for information.

As of this writing, compensation for overseas telephone staff runs about 40 percent lower than the same staff in the United States—and most of the costs of those calls are staff costs. Based on these cost savings, 3.4 million American jobs and 1.2 million European jobs are likely to go offshore by 2015, many of them jobs in call centers.3 But are those calls any better at helping people? Don’t you dread calling support on the phone and navigating those interactive voice response systems? The problem isn’t whether the person on the other end is in India or Ireland; it’s whether he or she can actually help. And as for Web self-service—sure, we all try it, but the results are hit or miss.

In a recent study of cancer patients by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health: See “The USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health National Survey of Households Affected by Cancer,” November 2006, available at http://forr.com/gsw8-2. 3. 3.4 million American jobs and 1.2 million European jobs will go offshore by 2015, many of them jobs in call centers: This estimate of American jobs going overseas comes from the May 14, 2004, Forrester report “Near-Term Growth Of Offshoring Accelerating” by John McCarthy, available at http://forr.com/gsw8-3a. The European estimate comes from the August 18, 2004, Forrester report “Two-Speed Europe: Why 1 Million Jobs Will Move Offshore” by Andrew Parker, available at http://forr.com/gsw8-3b. 4.


pages: 240 words: 65,363

Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fail fast, food miles, gamification, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, information security, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, medical residency, Metcalfe’s law, microbiome, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sunk-cost fallacy, Tony Hsieh, transatlantic slave trade, Wayback Machine, éminence grise

Which is why, rather than bury its phone number deep within the website, Zappos posted its number atop every page and staffed its call center 24/7. (Some calls, so long and intimate, resemble “protracted talk therapy,” as one observer noted.) Which is why Zappos offered a 365-day return window and free shipping. Which is why, when one customer failed to return a pair of shoes because of a death in the family, Zappos sent her flowers. To shift the framework like this—from a conventional financial one to a quasi-friendly one—Zappos first needed to shift the framework between the company itself and its workers. A call-center job isn’t typically very desirable, nor does it pay well.

And why a stroll through the cubicles at Zappos feels like a trip to Mardi Gras, with music, games, and costumes. Customer reps are encouraged to talk to a customer for as long as they want (all without a script, natch); they are authorized to settle problems without calling in a supervisor and can even “fire” a customer who makes trouble. Just how desirable is a call-center job at Zappos? In a recent year when it hired 250 new employees, the company fielded 25,000 applications—for a job that pays only $11 per hour! The most impressive result of all this frame-shifting? It worked: Zappos smoked the competition and became what is thought to be the biggest online shoe store in the world.


pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In 2008, Pentland studied a Bank of America call center. Such centers tend to be standardized and reductionist—up there with manufacturing in terms of the degree to which things are prescribed. Success is measured by AHT (average call handle time), which ideally should be as low as possible. Pentland gave workers sociometric badges all day for six weeks, and measured levels of interaction and engagement. When he shifted the coffee break system from being individual to being team based, interaction rose and AHT dropped, demonstrating a strong link between interaction and productivity. As a result, call center management converted the break structure of all call centers to the same system, and saved $15 million in productivity

As a result, call center management converted the break structure of all call centers to the same system, and saved $15 million in productivity. • • • But fostering such engagement is more easily said than done. Almost every company has posters and slogans urging employees to “work together,” but simply telling people to “communicate” is the equivalent of Taylor’s telling his workers to “do things faster,” and stopping there. GM, in addition to the “cost is everything” slogan, had posters everywhere reading “QUALITY ABOVE ALL”—but it was the former, not the latter, that was practiced. It is necessary, we found, to forcibly dismantle the old system and replace it with an entirely new managerial architecture.

engagement and external exploration . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 19–20. higher levels of creative output . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 100. 87.5 percent . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 102. high and low-performing groups . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 106. Bank of America call center . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 93. average call handle time . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 94. $15 million in productivity . . . Pentland, Social Physics, 95. PART IV LETTING GO No captain . . . Nicolson, Seize the Fire, 25. CHAPTER 10: HANDS OFF largest naval force . . .


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Beyond the imperative for solid execution, most startups confront only one “do or die” decision about their technology and operations: whether to outsource key activities or undertake them internally. For example, an entrepreneur might face choices about whether to equip a new warehouse or instead rent an existing facility; whether to outsource customer service to a third-party call center operator; and whether to build software applications in-house or hire a contractor. Such decisions involve significant risk, because a new venture’s first investment round often provides just enough capital to run the business for twelve to eighteen months. If it takes four months to figure out that outsourcing product development to a contractor was a big mistake, and another three months to recruit a team of engineers to do that work in-house, an entrepreneur could have burned through half of the capital she raised—with little progress to show and no margin for additional errors.

Likewise, the founder/CEOs of these struggling startups were more likely to have been disappointed with the quality of advice they received from their investors and more likely to report frequent, serious, and divisive conflict with investors over strategic priorities. Partners Finding the right strategic partners can have a major impact on an early-stage startup’s performance. Partners can lend their resources—key technologies, manufacturing capacity, warehouses, call centers, and so forth—to a new venture that lacks the wherewithal and/or time to develop such resources in-house. However, the asymmetry in bargaining power between a big, mature, resource-rich company and a fledgling startup can make it difficult to secure the right resources on reasonable terms. Quincy, for example, outsourced manufacturing to third-party clothing factories, a common practice for apparel startups.

Finally, a scaling startup already has engineers who can build the new products, and they may be able to speed up development by repurposing some technology and components. Likewise, the team may be able to gain operational efficiencies by leveraging slack capacity in operations, say, in warehouses or call centers. While these benefits from product line expansion may be compelling, the risks can be daunting. Any new product faces all of the liabilities of newness that we reviewed in Part I: Demand may be weaker than expected, rivals may offer a better mousetrap, product development may be delayed, and so forth.


pages: 549 words: 147,112

The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual-The Biggest Bank Failure in American History by Kirsten Grind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, financial engineering, fixed income, fulfillment center, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, junk bonds, low interest rates, Maui Hawaii, money market fund, mortgage debt, naked short selling, NetJets, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, too big to fail, Y2K

Meetings were held in conference rooms with the door closed, rather than in the shared areas that WaMu had created when it built the skyscraper. Everyone avoided the bank’s cubes, the tall, echoing “shower stalls” that could transmit noise across the room. At the FDIC in Washington, a representative in the agency’s call center e-mailed one of Bair’s deputies with an update at the end of the day. “The FDIC call center received 233 inquiries from WaMu customers concerned about the safety of their deposits. Call center staff indicated the volume was steady and the callers appeared to be very concerned.” That evening the three men most responsible for the country’s financial system—Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, New York Fed chairman Tim Geithner, and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke—delivered an ultimatum to a group of Wall Street bankers who had been instructed to gather at the Fed’s offices in lower Manhattan.

As Killinger worked on the Great Western deal, he and Debbie were in the middle of renovating the kitchen. Executives at the bank, calling with some concern or another about the merger, heard hammers banging in the background during the conversation. Killinger once drove to the opening of one of Washington Mutual’s new call centers with dirt under his fingernails, although this was unusual. Killinger cared strongly about appearances. They bought the house for $215,000 in 1983. By 2008, it was valued at about $2 million. Even when the Killingers had finished remodeling, however, the house looked respectable but average. It was the kind of house you might find in any upper-middle-class neighborhood.

She had suffered the same kind of devastation that beset Pepper, and she didn’t think she could just sit around and stew about it. On the phone, the two devised a plan to raise money for the hundreds of workers who they knew would soon lose their jobs. Specifically, they wanted to help the people working in WaMu’s call centers or its branches across the country—the ones working for less than $25 an hour. It would be known as the WaMu Alumni Fund. Other former WaMu executives joined the effort. Pepper wrote a long e-mail to the bank’s employees, explaining the group’s plans. Over the years, he had written many letters about the bank.


pages: 423 words: 149,033

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid by C. K. Prahalad

"World Economic Forum" Davos, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, call centre, cashless society, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, do well by doing good, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, information asymmetry, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, microcredit, new economy, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, shareholder value, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, time value of money, transaction costs, vertical integration, wealth creators, working poor

Block by block we slowly built up a clicks-and-mortar strategy.”18 This progressive and imaginative use of technology was a vital key to ICICI’s ability to serve the BOP profitably. ICICI Bank: Innovations in Finance 295 COPS Internet 7% 5% Call Center 6% Jan. 2002 Branch 35% ATM 47% Branch ATM Cash Jan. ’02 Transactions Apr. ’01 18% 19% 82% 81% Non-Cash Jan. ’02 Transactions Apr. ’01 41% 50% 33% 39% Call Centers Internet COPS Nil Nil 9% 6% 7% 5% 10% Nil Figure 2 ICICI’s channel usage. Source: http://r0.unctad.org/ecommerce/event_docs/monterey/ mor-icici-india-EFfD.ppt. ICICI also was a new entrant to retail banking.

Reducing Corruption: Transaction Governance Capacity Appendix: List of eSeva Services Payment of utility bills Electricity Water and sewerage Telephone bills Property tax Filing of CST returns Filing of A2 returns of APGST Filing of AA9 returns of APGST Collection of examination fee Filing of IT returns of salaried class Sale of prepaid parking tickets Permits and licenses Renewal of trade licenses Change of address of a vehicle owner Transfer of ownership of a vehicle Issue of driving licenses Renewal of driving licenses (nontransport vehicles) Registration of new vehicles Quarterly tax payments of autos Quarterly tax payments of goods vehicles Lifetime tax payments of new vehicles Certificates Registration of birth Registration of death Issue of birth certificates Issue of death certificates Internet services Internet-enabled electronic payments Downloading of forms and government orders Reservations and other services Reservation of APSRTC bus tickets Reservation of water tanker Filing of passport applications Sale of nonjudicial stamps Sale of trade license applications Sale of National Games tickets Sale of entry tickets for WTA Sale of EAMCET applications Business to Consumer (B2C) services Collection of telephone bill payments Sale of new AirTel prepaid phone cards Top up/recharge of AirTel Magic cards Sale of entry tickets for Tollywood Star cricket Sale of entry tickets for Cricket match (RWSO) Filing of Reliance CDMA mobile phone connections ■ ■ ■ ■ Railway reservation Sale of movie tickets Payment of traffic-related offenses Payment of degree examination fees of O.U. 97 98 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid Sale of I-CET applications Online reservation of Tirupati Temple tickets Collection of bill payments of Idea Cellular Collection of bill payments of HUTCH Issue of encumbrance certificate Market value assistance General insurance Reservation of tourism tickets for accommodation Reservation of tourism bus tickets Call center Indian Airlines ticket reservation Life insurance premium payment Issue of caste certificates Sale of Indira Vikas Patra ATM services Collection of bill payments of Air Tel Renewal of drug licenses Issue of bus passes Collection of trade licenses of Labor Department 6 Development as Social Transformation W e have looked at the BOP as a viable and profitable growth market.

Monitoring thousands of drivers, damages to merchandise, turnover, and attending to customer demands for more accurate delivery time forecasting are not trivial. Finally, controlling the default level might be the key challenge for Casas Bahia. The company opened a centralized call and collection center to address this challenge. Since consolidating more than 300 call center employees from all stores, collections recovery has increased 100 percent. Casas Bahia must develop a process whereby it can maintain or reduce its current default rate while continuing with its plan of rapid expansion. Another threat is the increasing competition of large hypermarts. It is unclear whether or not those chains will develop the capability to serve the BOP with any significant presence.


pages: 282 words: 26,931

The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It by Craig Brandon

Bernie Madoff, call centre, corporate raider, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, impulse control, new economy, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader

Lenders set up funds and lines of credit for schools to use in exchange for putting the banks on their preferred lender list and for the colleges dropping out of the direct federal loan program, which was designed to provide low-interest loans to students. In addition, colleges allowed lenders to set up call centers that directed calls from parents to the college about student aid directly to the lenders’ call centers, where the people who answered the phone pretended to be college employees. They were actually salesmen from the loan companies. Why bother with the government loans and all those forms, parents were told, when the predatory lenders here can do all the work for you?

While the 2010 changes to the federal student loan program will help this problem by increasing Pell grants to low-income students and reducing the payments for student loans, the bloated costs of higher education will remain a significant problem until they are dealt with by college administrations. In chapter two, we looked at the kickbacks that party school administrators were accepting from predatory lenders in exchange for allowing them to set up call centers where lenders pretended to be college employees. In addition, some colleges allowed lenders to put their names on the college’s “preferred lender” lists that implied they were endorsed by the college. Students who complained to administrators about financial problems were simply handed a predatory loan application, even though the government loan programs usually offer a much better deal.


pages: 236 words: 77,735

Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game by Lee Munson

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, call centre, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, follow your passion, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, High speed trading, housing crisis, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, off-the-grid, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, power law, price discovery process, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, short squeeze, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, too big to fail, trade route, Vanguard fund, walking around money

The brokerage firm was switching tons of assets from the brokerage side to the banking side to boost the bank’s deposits. It was nuts. Overnight, a bank that had nothing but a call center and a single location in Reno was now ready to start borrowing money from the Federal Reserve based on deposits that were created overnight with the click of a mouse. Each step was carefully crafted to quickly capitalize a bank in order to lend money on mortgages. Total loyalty would need to be enforced. Step two was the credit cards. Hey, I got one myself. They were pushing the cards on anyone they could get to fill out the form or call into the credit call center. It didn’t matter if you had a big or small account, or even if you had an account in the first place.

Actually, it wasn’t really the bank, but PHH Mortgage. They provide “Private Label Solutions” and according to their web site are the “mortgage engine behind many leading banks and financial institutions including Charles Schwab Bank, First Tennessee Bank, Merrill Lynch Credit Corporation, UMB.”5 Once, the person in the call center told me the Merrill Lynch mortgage room was next door. I plugged the referral number into the CRM, and once the deal closed, I was paid my money. We never called it a commission, but it is hard to call it anything else. While I was able, over the years, to do a few primary mortgage referrals, most of the action was in HELOCs.


pages: 213 words: 73,492

The Actual One: How I Tried, and Failed, to Remain Twenty-Something for Ever by Isy Suttie

call centre, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube

Luckily, being a single writer/performer/Pac-Man aficionado allowed me to scrabble around to my heart’s content, because I didn’t have to inform a boyfriend of my scrabbling schedule and because you don’t really have to grow up in my job. Admittedly, at THAT point, to make ends meet I was also working in a call center for a virtually bankrupt food-delivery company in a corrugated iron shack with no windows, but that made me feel that my options were even more open. Surely they were open. They had to be. At the very least, someone was going to build a window into the wall. Weren’t they? This is a book about what happened after that pivotal moment at the service station when Amy and Gavin, two of the best housemates I’ve ever had, told me they were having a baby.

Some of them were from school, and I could barely recall them—a blur of clumsy kisses that tasted of cider and Embassy Filter cigarettes, things that happened while one of you was babysitting, buying matching T-shirts, sweaty palms on roller coasters, broken hearts that felt like they would never heal, and a prismatic myriad of terrible fingering techniques. The three six-to-nine-month ones weren’t worth examination, either. One had been at youth theater, and was only really because he was Kenickie in Grease; the second was with a guy from a call center I once worked at who said “groovy” a lot; and the third was with Tom, a musician who was lovely but not right for me. So that left the long-term one that wasn’t Sam—an on-off relationship with a guy in college that was fueled by lager and late-night chats about which Mike Leigh film we’d ideally be in (little did we know we were about to graduate straight into playing pigs, rats, ducks, and crack addicts in Theater in Education tours*)—it was just one of those inevitable drama-school things that happens, like orange leg warmers and people dribbling with concentration as they try to become “centered.”

HIS WIFE: Erm—we paid a tenner to get in— SCOTTISH GUY NEAR BACK: No, Ruth, this is so bad, I’ve got to do something. For the sake of all of us. PEOPLE AROUND HIM: Yeah! SCOTTISH GUY NEAR BACK: I’ll pay you twenty quid to get off! I pause, strum the trusty D chord again, and look at him. I hadn’t gone full time with stand-up at that point. I was working in the call center, and twenty pounds was a hell of a lot of money to me. In a way, this would be “earning money from stand-up,” wouldn’t it? I was standing on a stage, talking, and someone was going to give me money. In fact, they were giving me a pound a minute! The fact that he was giving me money to stop talking was a small detail.


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

But that afternoon, I tried to call my daughter in France using my brand new phone. No luck. The phone did not allow me to make international calls. This led me into the Kafkian world of customer service. I first called the store and asked to be connected with the mobile phone department. No one picked up. I then tried the call center and talked to a representative, who could not help me. I eventually had to take another trip to the store to get this fixed. For me, it was a textbook case of a company that had become more focused on selling a product than genuinely seeking to help its customers. The company was shooting itself in both feet by having front liners no longer able or motivated to truly engage with customers and meet their needs.

If sensors reveal, for example, that the fridge does not get opened often enough or that people do not get out of bed, the agents can initiate help. When we started investigating GreatCall as a business, we were shocked to learn that fewer than 2 percent of the call agents leave their job every year. In most call centers, turnover is typically over 100 percent a year. It is a draining job to answer customers’ complaints and often be unable to help much. GreatCall is a jaw-dropping exception because employees know they are saving lives. Still, finding meaning and purpose is not restricted to jobs that involve saving lives.

Effective diversity at the board level is about finding the right skills and building critical mass—not tokenism—so different perspectives and views achieve better outcomes.15 Racial imbalances among employees turned out to be more challenging to redress. In 2016, focus groups I ran with minority employees and managers made one thing painfully clear to me: our African American colleagues often felt stuck at entry-level positions, with few prospects for advancement. At headquarters, they felt trapped in the call center, hardly ever considered for promotions. Best Buy’s General Counsel Keith Nelsen, as executive sponsor of the Black Employee Resource Group, was batting hard on behalf of Black candidates, but they never got the jobs. Many employees of color were from other parts of the country and felt displaced in Minnesota.


pages: 318 words: 78,451

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David J. Anderson

airport security, anti-pattern, business intelligence, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, continuous integration, corporate governance, database schema, domain-specific language, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, performance metric, six sigma, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

It was launched to the market as PCS Vision. The launch involved release of around 15 new handsets with a target of 16 new features that utilized the high-speed data capabilities of the new network. Sprint had a retail network across the United States that employed 17,000 people. They had a similar number of folks in call centers who took customer-care calls from users. Both the retail sales channel and the customer-care associates had to be trained to support the launch of the new service. I jokingly suggested that the best way to do this would be shut everything down for two days, fly everyone into Kansas City for a night, and rent the Kansas City Chiefs’ stadium, where we could deliver a two-hour PowerPoint presentation on the big screens at either end of the stadium.

Our customers would hardly accept a 48-hour support outage while we trained our operators on the next generation of technology. And losing two days of sales revenue from the retail channel wouldn’t have helped our annual revenue targets. A training program was devised, and train-the-trainer education was delivered. A program for training regional retail staff was devised, as was a similar one for call centers. Trainers were sent out into the field for six weeks to train small groups of people as they came off shift. The cost of delivering the training was huge. The time commitment—six weeks—was significant, and the half-life of the training in the memories of the workforce was also about six weeks.

Failure Load Failure load is demand generated by the customer that might have been avoided through higher quality delivered earlier. For example, a lot of help desk calls generate costs for a business. If the software or technology product or service were of higher quality, more usable, more intuitive, more fit-for-purpose, then there would be fewer calls. This would enable the business to reduce the number of call center personnel and reduce costs. Lots of calls to a help desk tend to generate lots of production defect tickets. When selecting the functions in scope for a project or iteration, the business must choose between new ideas and production defects. Production defects aren’t just software bugs; they include usability problems and other non-functional issues such as poor performance, lack of responsiveness under load or certain network conditions, and so on.


pages: 133 words: 42,254

Big Data Analytics: Turning Big Data Into Big Money by Frank J. Ohlhorst

algorithmic trading, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, create, read, update, delete, data acquisition, data science, DevOps, extractivism, fault tolerance, information security, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, machine readable, natural language processing, Network effects, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, RFID, sentiment analysis, six sigma, smart meter, statistical model, supply-chain management, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application

Some of the data may have to be purchased, and some may be available under the public domain. The key is to start with the internal, structured data first, such as sales logs, inventory movement, registered transactions, customer information, pricing, and supplier interactions. Next come the unstructured data, such as call center and support logs, customer feedback (perhaps e-mails and other communications), surveys, and data gathered by sensors (store traffic, parking lot usage). The list can include many other internally tracked elements; however, it is critical to be aware of diminishing returns on investment with the data sourced.

The prospect of being able to process troves of data very quickly, in-memory, without time-consuming forays to retrieve information stored on disk drives, will be a major enabler, and this will allow companies to assemble, sort, and analyze data much more rapidly. For example, T-Mobile is using SAP’s HANA to mine data on its 30 million U.S. customers from stores, text messages, and call centers to tailor personalized deals. What used to take T-Mobile a week to accomplish can now be done in three hours with the SAP system. Organizations that can utilize this capability to make faster and more informed business decisions will have a distinct advantage over competitors. In a short period of time, Hadoop has transitioned from relative obscurity as a consumer Internet project into the mainstream consciousness of enterprise IT.


pages: 130 words: 43,665

Powerful: Teams, Leaders and the Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord

call centre, data science, future of work, job satisfaction, late fees, Silicon Valley, Skype, subscription business, the scientific method, women in the workforce

That commitment to achievement is what we want to foster, not the expectation that as long as you’re working hard, the company will have your back. We should not make false promises of job security. I was consulting to a CEO and he asked me, “What should I do about our call center people? We’ve moved the rest of the company into a new building, and I don’t think we want to bring our call center people into the space. I think it might be best to outsource that work now.” I asked him, “Why have you been lying to them?” He said, “What are you talking about? I would never do that! Never in a million years!” So I asked him, “Is it true that you said that everybody who comes to work for you will have a future in the company, that their career with the company will continue as long as they’re willing to contribute?”


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Mike Halsall, a construction company executive, told us that significant disruptions to his industry include: Increased collaboration (making an opaque industry more transparent and substantially more efficient) Ever-more sophisticated design software and visualization 3D printing Halsall estimates that the sum of these disruptions could reduce the number of people working in construction by more than 25 percent within ten years. (The construction industry, by the way, represents a $4.7 trillion industry annually.) In the corporate travel industry, Russ Howell, EVP of Global Technology at BCD Travel, notes that 50 percent of the transactions at telephone-based call centers moved to the Internet in less than a decade. Furthermore, he expects 50 percent of those to move to mobile smartphones within three years. As this new information-based paradigm causes the very metabolism of the world to heat up, we’re increasingly feeling its macroeconomic impact. For example, the cheapest 3D printers now cost only $100, which means that within five years or so most of us will be able to afford 3D printers to fabricate toys, cutlery, tools and fittings—essentially anything we’re able to dream up.

Needless to say, Xiaomi features a full complement of ExO characteristics. Xiaomi has an extremely flat structure consisting of core founders, department leaders and about 4,300 employees, a system that enables short-line communication and decision-making in a fast-paced organization [Autonomy]. Some 3,000 employees, including 1,500 people working at a call center, perform e-commerce, logistics and after-sales. The rest of the workforce (1,300 employees) works in R&D, which, at 30 percent of the workforce, is significant. The culture of the individual teams is that of a traditional clan or tribe—family-like and focused on mentoring, collaboration and adhocracy [Autonomy, Experimentation].

We’ve already seen some of the ways Zappos uses ExO attributes: an emphasis on customer service [MTP: “Provide the Best Customer Service Possible”]; its creation of a community around common passions and a common location in the Las Vegas Downtown Project, and its managed communities through Like-Like relationships [Community]; and its use of the Face Game to improve internal culture [Engagement: gamification]. To that list add the fact that Zappos employees answer 5,000 calls a month and 1,200 emails a week (and even more during the holiday season, when call-frequency increases significantly). Call center employees don’t have scripts and there are no limits on call times; in fact, the longest Zappos call reported is ten hours and twenty-nine minutes [Autonomy, Dashboards]. 50 percent of a new recruit’s probationary review is based on his or her cultural fit with the company. Each recruit spends four weeks shadowing experienced employees [MTP], and at the end of that period is offered $3,000 to leave the company—further weeding out cultural misfits.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

Across the United States, calls to 211 networks (which provide information about social services and emergency support) also skyrocketed during the pandemic, to 75,000 calls a day from 30,000 per day during ordinary times, according to United Way Worldwide, which runs the 211 program. Calls also lasted longer, with some taking as long as thirty minutes versus the usual four to six minutes, as many people were food or housing insecure for the first time and had no idea where to begin. Ordinarily, if a disaster hits one region and the local call center gets overwhelmed, other call centers in other parts of the country can provide backup. But this time all of the 211 networks were swamped. To deal with the overload, developers at United Way used Twilio Flex to create a system that lets people in any part of the country call an 800 number and get routed to their local 211 service or go to an AI-assisted interactive voice response (IVR) system that answered commonly asked questions.

Providers can launch a video visit with a patient, review relevant patient history, and update clinical documentation directly within Epic. Not all of the new use cases involved life-and-death situations. In Brugherio, Italy, we helped QVC Italia, a TV-based shopping channel, remain in operation by deploying a Twilio-based call center that let its customer service agents work from home. The new system supports not just phone calls but also SMS and WhatsApp—and took less than a week to get up and running. Back in the States, we helped Comcast integrate Twilio Video into their internal customer database so technicians could help a customer whose critical TV or Internet connection wasn’t working, without having to step foot in the customer’s house.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The company uses the accompanying analytic suite to “identify top performers” (and, by implication, those at the bottom as well), and plan schedules and distribute assignments in the store accordingly. Theatro’s devices are less elaborate than a Hitachi wearable called Business Microscope, which aims to capture, quantify and make inferences from several dimensions of employee behavior.33 As grim as call-center work is, a Hitachi press release brags about their ability to render it more dystopian yet via the use of this tool—improving performance metrics not by reducing employees’ workload, but by compelling them to be more physically active during their allotted break periods.34 Hitachi’s wearables, in turn, are less capable than the badges offered by Cambridge, MA, startup Sociometric Solutions, which are “equipped with two microphones, a location sensor and an accelerometer” and are capable of registering “tone of voice, posture and body language, as well as who spoke to whom for how long.”35 As with all of these devices, the aim is to continuously monitor (and eventually regulate) employee behavior.

Though top executives may, for the time being, manage to wriggle free from algorithmic performance evaluation, it seems highly likely that employment at all other levels will become increasingly contingent on a continuously iterated double articulation of assessment and selection that leaves no room whatsoever for the distracted, the halfway-competent, the deliberately shirking or simply the different. Everything that wearables and workstation systems do for the shop floor, the call center and the checkout counter, analytic suites like BetterWorks do for the management echelon.41 The same anomaly detection subroutines that identify when a customer service representative’s average call length or escalation rate has climbed past the permissible value can trivially discover when someone is away from their desk too long, taking over-frequent bathroom breaks or gossiping with friends in other departments (never mind that such interdepartmental contacts are how organizations break through groupthink and actually innovate).42 As employee monitoring (and self-monitoring) inexorably advances across the enterprise, the data it generates won’t simply evaporate.

Nothing that might challenge the social and economic order in any way is ever allowed to breach the surface. The state retains full responsibility for the distribution of social goods, doling them out as rewards to parties in favor, and withholding them from suspect ethnicities and other fractious social formations. Everyday life in Perfect Harmony is the voice-stress analysis of the call-center worker that allows for the training of the virtual agent that replaces her. It is the risk-assessment algorithm that predicted she would be laid off, and preemptively raised the APR on her loans, as well as the blockchain-mediated smartlock that turfs her out of her high-rise microflat the moment she comes up short on rent.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Across the country, it created an opportunity to learn about the new challenges that tech was creating and the brighter prospects that might emerge if we could harness technology in new ways.8 As we drove the Interstate 10 corridor, a recent addition to the El Paso economy caught our eye. Massive call centers had sprung up in the desert, a rapidly growing industry drawing on the region’s ability to recruit workers who speak both English and Spanish. These call centers, which employ thousands of El Pasoans, can serve a population of almost a billion people throughout the Western Hemisphere. But as we toured the area, a nagging thought weighed heavily, and it wasn’t a happy one. Many of these call center jobs could vanish a decade from now, maybe even sooner, replaced by artificial intelligence. As we met with the region’s leaders to talk about how AI was likely to impact the local economy, it seemed important to start with a caveat.

But with improved outdoor microphones, artificial intelligence can capture and understand the spoken word as well as a person, meaning that this task could soon be performed entirely by a machine. Before we know it, we’ll approach a drive-through and talk to a computer rather than a person. The computer may not be 100 percent accurate, but neither is a human being. That’s why there will be an opportunity to verify and correct our order. It’s why we looked at the burgeoning call-center industry in El Paso with a mixture of admiration and concern. So much of talking to customers on the phone involves understanding what they want and solving their problems. But computers are handling simple customer support requests already. Often it feels as if the hardest thing to do when calling for customer support is reaching a real person.


pages: 554 words: 167,247

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, asset light, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, business process, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, crony capitalism, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, obamacare, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, the payments system, young professional

Kushner’s business plan had projected that 7,500 people would sign up by the time the October 1 launch enrollment period ended on March 31, 2014. Oscar would need a lot of word of mouth, propelled by those ads and the distribution of its literature in targeted neighborhoods, to get that many people to click through and buy. Still, as a crew of new customer service call center people were being tested with mock questions (“I’m thirty-two. Why do I need this?”) in a glass-enclosed room off to the side, Kushner and his partners were pumped. They thought they had cracked the code. That they understood the numbers. That their outsourced telemedicine doctors would not create a budget hole.

One reported in at about 8:30 that the only problem was traffic on the phone lines, which had become jammed. The traffic was now so high, one senior person reported to one of the CMS press people, that he was beginning to think they had been “hacked by some right wingers. But so far so good.” “HAVE A GREAT DAY” By now Bataille was picking up reports from call center supervisors that people were complaining about something having to do with the identity verification process for registering an account. Either it was broken or the instructions about how to use it were unclear. I already knew that. At 8 A.M. I had gone online pretending to be from Indiana (one of the thirty-six states on the federal exchange) and was told, first, that, unlike in Kentucky, I had to establish an account before I could browse around.

Here’s what I got back: This is what we’re telling reporters right now: “We have built a dynamic system and are prepared to make adjustments as needed and improve the consumer experience. This new system will allow millions of Americans to access quality, affordable health care coverage.… Consumers who need help can also contact the call center, use the live chat function, or go to localhelp.​healthcare.​gov to find an in-person assistor in their community.” It was a parodylike attempt to glide over reality with the kind of happy talk—“dynamic”!—that Washington reporters roll their eyes at. My own reaction to that statement and to the “Have a great day” live chat sign-off was more jaundiced.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

“I can’t tell you how many checkbooks we printed to first name ‘asdf’ last name ‘jkl’… and all of them got printed,” Steve Armstrong remembered. On top of it all, X.com’s phone line exploded with customer complaints. One news article pointed to X.com’s call volume as evidence of early traction, but for its team members fielding calls in a makeshift back-office call center (dubbed “the cave”), angry customers were a perpetual source of anxiety. Everyone, it seems, was a critic. In late January 2000, X.com’s CEO’s mother, Maye Musk, wrote to her son with product guidance. “A friend and I don’t use our titanium credit card much as we cannot get frequent flyer miles.

If something went wrong, users reasoned, it must be X.com’s fault. Customer service, company leadership decided, must be made a priority. * * * At first, X.com tried the typical approach: outsourcing calls and complaints. X.com contracted with California-based firms, including staffing a call center in Burbank. But these solutions were expensive and often incapable of solving user problems. “They charged us tons of money, and they were terrible,” Musk said. X.com’s Julie Anderson set out to find a solution. Anderson scouted other customer service firms around the country, including one promising location in Boise, Idaho.

Responsible. Hardworking. You name it,” remembered Anderson. Because of the outpost’s early success, X.com leadership gave the go ahead to briskly expand the Nebraska operation, which grew from a couple dozen customer service reps on April 17 to 161 reps by May 12. In a mere matter of weeks, the Nebraska call center had more employees than the company’s Palo Alto headquarters, and the group’s results were dramatic. By May 12, 2000, X.com could proudly announce in a company-wide email that “the email backlog is nearly gone.” The company also closed the expensive Burbank customer service operation. That summer and in the years that followed, X.com employees made regular pilgrimages to Omaha—product team members in order to understand the tools needed by reps, company executives to establish relationships with the Omaha senior managers, and more.


pages: 473 words: 140,480

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy

8-hour work day, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, desegregation, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, old-boy network, one-China policy, race to the bottom, reshoring, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, value engineering, work culture

In 1975, right out of high school, Kissee started her working career doing piecework for Sara Lee Knit Products, and she was earning ten dollars an hour plus benefits when it closed in 1994—not long after Chinese textile managers came and watched her work. “In the beginning, we used to get truckloads of stuff they’d sewed badly, and we had to redo their mistakes,” she recalled. “No one ever said we’d be replaced.” But replaced she was, first in the textile mills, then in the call centers—where it was workers from the Philippines who ultimately nabbed her call-center job at StarTek in 2011. It was her sixth layoff or company closing in eighteen years. “I like’d to died,” Sallie Wells of Bassett told the Martinsville Bulletin on the day the W.M. plant closing was announced. She’d spent ten years working in its sanding room.

I took notes while Henry County assistant prosecutor Wayne Withers drove my car, pointing out churches where copper pipes had been ripped out and homes where burglars were caught stealing opiates and antianxiety drugs. We drove past sad old strip malls and parking lots riddled with weeds, vacant except for a guy hawking sports jerseys from the trunk of his car. We drove by the abandoned call center that was supposed to reemploy hundreds of the displaced workers and did so, beginning in 2004—before it shut down, eight years later, and moved offshore to the Philippines. “I see a lot of people in court now for fighting with their wives,” Withers said. “People who were middle class before they lost their jobs.

Ed) is pictured on the wall of the corporate offices, aka the Taj Mahal. (Photograph by Jared Soares) Aftermath: A Trade Adjustment Assistance worker helps displaced Henry County worker Frances Kissee fill out her paperwork. Kissee lost six jobs in eighteen years to closures, the most recent in 2012 when the Martinsville call center she was working for moved operations to the Philippines. (Photograph by Jared Soares) Aftermath: Once regal, C.C. Bassett’s house on the hill has fallen into disrepair, along with most of the town. “It’s a money pit,” said current owner Carolyn Brown, who has trouble heating it in winter. Mr.


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When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

One former McKinsey consultant said the firm earned its money reorganizing parts of the company. Stephen Smith had worked for more than twenty years at a call center in Connecticut when, with no warning, he learned the company was closing three area call centers, including his. At age forty-six, Smith had to search for a new job. As reported by The Guardian, Smith said about ninety employees were offered severance packages or the option of relocating to Georgia or Tennessee—not a viable option for employees with spouses who worked, or who had children in school. Cindy Liddick had worked at the AT&T call center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for twelve years before it closed in 2018.

McKinsey designed a system—the Claims Core Process Redesign—that pushed adjusters to make quick, lowball offers rather than allow them to come up with settlements that they considered fair. Adjusters, now tethered to a computerized claims system called Colossus, were reduced to little more than call-center workers reading prepared scripts. Pop-outs became rare. For homeowners’ claims, it was another computer program—Xactimate. But the idea was the same. Push claimants to accept less than the covered amount. Allstate says this characterization is “false and misleading” and that it overhauled its claims system in the 1990s to “pay claims more promptly and accurately.”


pages: 575 words: 140,384

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

From its early days, HBO executives took a look at these regional call centers and saw an opportunity. HBO filled its satellite offices with specialists whose job was to sidle up to the cable company call centers and win over their employees. In theory, the phone operators were supposed to be telling customers about a diverse range of offers, say, a one-time discount from the Disney Channel, or a special offer from Showtime. But HBO’s specialists did everything they could to make sure that HBO, not Showtime, was at the forefront of conversations by lavishing rewards on the call center employees, ranging from cash to appliances to plane tickets to Hawaii.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A ABC, 15, 80 Abdul-Mateen II, Yahya, 330 Abraham, Nancy, 341, 368 Abraham, Seth, 38, 55, 121–22 Adams, Amy, 341 Adamson, Allen, 337 Adler, Ed, 195 advertising (See marketing) Akselrad, Harold, 181, 204 Albrecht, Chris, 45, 54, 87, 104, 137, 185, 350 background of, 25–27 Band of Brothers and, 135, 147, 153 as CEO of HBO, 160 on Chris Rock, 93 Comic Relief, staging of, 29–30 Emerson affair and assault by, 56–58, 126, 197–99 at IMG, 211–12 investment in TV series and, 79–81 Jensen assault and arrest of, 194–97, 199 marriage to Coady, 243–45 resignation of, 199 The Sopranos and, 97–101, 105–6, 125–26, 127 as West Coast programming head, 27–30 The Wire and, 171 Albrecht, Kate, 245 Aldrin, Buzz, 108 Alexander, Jason, 50 Alford Plea, 249–50 Ali, Muhammad, 1, 4, 5 Allen, Woody, 342 All England Club, 53 Altman, Robert, 39 Altschuler, John, 271 “Always on Sunday” (Tammany Hall), 145–46 Amazon, 337 AMC, 210–11, 237, 283 American Beauty, 139 Americans, The, 283 American Way of Death, The (Mitford), 138–39 Amy Schumer: Live at the Apollo, 282 Anderson, Don, 68 And the Band Played On, 60–61 Angels in America (Kushner), 165 Angels in America (TV series), 165–67, 169 Antholis, Kary, 31–32, 108, 163, 164 anthology series, 46–47 Any Given Wednesday, 291 AOL-Time Warner HBO, impact on, 141–43 merger creating, 133–34 stock performance of, 159–60 See also Time Warner Apatow, Judd, 56, 110, 230–31 Apple TV, 278 Arledge, Roone, 35–36 Arli$$, 79 Armstrong, Jesse, 313–15, 359, 360–61 AT&T announces streaming service, 319 debt load of, 328 dividend of, 328–29 Elliott Management stake in, 325 Justice Department antitrust suit against, 301–2, 309 relationship between HBO and AT&T executives, 317–18 Stankey-Plepler town hall on post-merger future of HBO, 309–12 Time Warner purchased by, 295–98 WarnerMedia spinoff and merger with Discovery, 353–59 Auerbach, Jeffrey, 163 B Baldwin, Dave, 52, 134, 143, 145, 160, 249, 250 Baldwin, Jason, 82, 83 Balian, Gina, 224 Ball, Alan, 139–41, 143–44, 173, 220, 222 Ballers, 287 Band of Brothers, 135, 147, 152–53 Barr, Roseanne, 44 Barris, Kenya, 333 Bartlett, Murray, 363 BBDO Worldwide, 84–85 Bellamar, Ariane, 350–51 Benben, Brian, 49–50 Benioff, David, 223, 224, 225, 300, 301 Ben Stiller Show, The, 56 Berbick, Trevor, 37 Berg, Alec, 271 Berkes, Otto as chief technology officer, 260–61 confrontations between Berkes’s team and HBO’s IT department, 274–76 difficulties in creating platform for HBO Now, 274–76 plan for overhauling streaming service (Project Halley), 261–63 Plepler and, 275–76 resignation of, 277 Berlinger, Joe, 69–71, 82, 83, 84, 248, 249, 250, 303, 304 Bernstein, Rick, 192, 214 Bewkes, Jeffrey, 55, 87, 206 Albrecht arrest for assaulting Jensen, handling of, 57–58, 195–97, 199 at Albrecht’s wedding to Coady, 243–45 background and early career of, 77–78 Band of Brothers contract and, 135 as CEO of HBO, 73, 77–79 as co-COO of AOL-Time Warner, 160 dismissive on Netflix’s success, 239, 269 ends tennis coverage, 121–22 From the Earth to the Moon budget approved by, 106–7 on Fuchs dismissal, 74 investment in TV series and, 79 sale of Time-Warner to AT&T and, 295–96 Time Warner-AOL merger and, 143 Big Little Lies, 344 Big Love, 187 Binder, Mike, 154 Biondi, Frank, 24, 41 biopics, 59–63 Bitterman, Betty, 119–20, 137–38 Black Lady Sketch Show, A, 342 Black viewership, 68–69 Blockbuster, 132, 180, 234 Bloodworth-Thomason, Linda, 188, 217 Bloys, Casey, 172, 230, 253–54, 271, 284 data science and, 368–69 female executives hired under, 342 Insecure and, 299 on Netflix’s spending on stand-up comedy, 294 as president of programming, 287 Succession and, 315, 316 on “the next great show,” 369–70 Boardwalk Empire, 231–33 Boedeker, Hal, 209 Bowie, David, 50 Bowman, Robert, 277 boxing programming, 34–38, 54–56, 190–94, 214, 316 Braun, Lloyd, 94, 95 Brie, Alison, 350 Bright, Kevin, 49–50 Bright Shining Lie, A, 114–16 Brim, Margaret, 121–22 Brindle, Shelley, 19, 142, 185, 197, 245, 267, 276–77, 280 Brodsky, Irene Taylor, 304 Brown, Tina, 213 Bryant Park office, 24 budget for Band of Brothers, 135, 292–93 for Dream On, 50 in early 1980s, 29 for From the Earth to the Moon, 106–7 for Game of Thrones, 224 “HBO shrug” and, 135, 153, 158–59, 293 for Larry Sanders Show, 66, 67 licensing/coproduction strategy for early series, 66–67 for Nevins’s documentaries, 31 for The Pacific, 292, 293 for Sopranos episodes, 126–27 theatrical model of budgeting for shows, 158–59 for Tyson, 38 Burns, Ed, 104 Buscemi, Steve, 232–33 Bushnell, Candace, 88–92, 168 business model cable operator call centers, relationship with, 19 customer data, lack of, 18–19 lavish entertainment of clients, 19 Byers, Mark, 70–71, 82–83 C Californication, 211 Callender, Colin, 61–62, 86, 87, 166, 217 Campbell, Bruce, 356 Campbell, Joseph, 99 Caramanica, Jon, 298 Carlin, George, 28–29 Carnivàle, 187, 241 Carson, Johnny, 65 Carvey, Dana, 65 Case, Steve, 134, 296 “Case for Reparations, The” (Coates), 329–30 Cathouse, 22 Cayce, Edgar, 98–99 CBS, 15, 17, 45–46, 90, 164–65 Central Park West, 89–90 Century Plaza Tower office, 28 Chaney, Jen, 342 Chappelle, Dave, 65, 294 Chase, David, 93–101, 105, 123–24, 147–48, 162, 208, 226, 348–49, 369 Chau, Hong, 330 Cher, 86 Chernin, Peter, 27, 295 Chernobyl, 368 Cherry, Marc, 171 “Chimps” ad campaign, 84–85 Chris Rock Show, The, 92–93 churn, 20–21 Cinemax, 18 Citizen Cohn, 59 Clarkson, S.


pages: 340 words: 91,387

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

Other countries offer tax breaks to whole swaths of industries—for instance, this is how India promoted the creation of industrial parks to house call centers and information technology firms. What’s interesting about these deals is that, in essence, they legally convey to certain segments of the business community the benefits of being in System D. Of course, you might argue that these businesses are excellent investments in the long run—that New York office towers will, over the long haul, wind up stimulating the economy and producing additional tax revenues, that the workers hired by the call centers and IT firms in India are young people who will constitute the country’s growing and prosperous middle class for decades to come.

Of course, you might argue that these businesses are excellent investments in the long run—that New York office towers will, over the long haul, wind up stimulating the economy and producing additional tax revenues, that the workers hired by the call centers and IT firms in India are young people who will constitute the country’s growing and prosperous middle class for decades to come. But, on the other side of the debate, some argue that office towers would get built anyway without any subsidy and that the tax deals promote overdevelopment. And, in the Indian arena, some economists point out that the number of people working in call centers and IT businesses is a tiny percentage of the population. Street hawking, by contrast, employs far more people, and is, therefore, far more crucial to India’s economic survival. Another economic complaint against System D businesses is that they are simply not geared to grow. As sociologist Alejandro Portes, who has written analytical works about System D since the 1980s, put it, “This is not an engine for capital accumulation and investment.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

In fact, software and hardware have progressed so rapidly that by 2009, chess programs running on ordinary personal computers, and even mobile phones, have achieved grandmaster levels with Elo ratings of 2,898 and have won tournaments against the top human players.31 Labor and Capital Technology is not only creating winners and losers among those with differing amounts of human capital, it is also changing the way national income is divided between the owners of physical capital and labor (people like factory owners and factory workers)—the two classical inputs to production. When Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn, purchased thirty thousand robots to work in the company’s factories in China, he was substituting capital for labor.32 Similarly, when an automated voice-response system usurps some of the functions of human call center operators, the production process has more capital and less labor. Entrepreneurs and managers are constantly making these types of decisions, weighing the relative costs of each type of input, as well as the effects on the quality, reliability, and variety of output that can be produced. Rod Brooks estimates that the Baxter robot we met in chapter 2 works for the equivalent of about four dollars per hour, including all costs.33 As we discussed at the start of this chapter, to the extent that a factory owner previously employed a human to do the same task that Baxter could do, the economic incentive would be to substitute capital (Baxter) for labor as long as the human was paid more than four dollars per hour.

But over time inertia may be overcome by the advantages of reducing transit times for finished products and being closer to customers, engineers and designers, educated workers, or even regions where the rule of law is strong. This can bring manufacturing back to America, as entrepreneurs like Rod Brooks have been emphasizing. A similar argument applies outside of manufacturing. For instance, interactive voice-response systems are automating jobs in call centers. United Airlines has been successful in making such a transition. This can disproportionally affect low-cost workers in places like India and the Philippines. Similarly, many medical doctors used to have their dictation sent overseas to be transcribed. But an increasing number are now happy with computer transcription.

Immigration Policy (West) breast cancer Bresnahan, Tim Brin, Sergey broadband Brookings Institution Brooks, Rodney browsers Brynjolfsson, Erik Buddha Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. (BEA) business: burdens and mandates on computer use in; see also information technology (IT) Moore’s Law in process changes in regulation of robot use in; see also automation see also manufacturing business cycles Busque, Leah Byrne, Donald California, University of, at Berkeley call centers Canada, immigrant entrepreneurship in Capek, Karel capital: bargaining power associated with intangible labor’s replacement by nonhuman capital, human see also superstars capital, organizational capitalism Card, David Carlsberg breweries Carnegie Mellon University Case, Steve Cato Institute Cavallo, Alberto Center for American Progress Chesky, Brian chess Chetty, Raj Chile, immigrant entrepreneurship in China: automation in capitalism in manufacturing employment in Chinn, Menzie choice modeling Christmas Carol, A (Dickens) Chunara, Rumi Churchill, Winston circuits, integrated Cisco Systems cities, plunder and conquest of Clark, John Bates Clarke, Arthur C.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

As MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson and his collaborators (Lorin Hitt of the University of Pennsylvania, Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford University, and my NYU colleague Prasanna Tambe, among others) have discovered in a series of studies, digital technologies hold the potential to dramatically improve the productivity of economic activity organized within companies, but such productivity gains only accrue to those firms (about 20% of all firms in their studies) that also invest in a series of “complementary organizational changes,” like the redesign of work, an increase in performance-based pay, an increased empowerment of workers, and a flattening of the hierarchy.12 We have also witnessed a wide range of outsourcing that has been enabled by digital technologies, as Dartmouth’s James Quinn described in detail in his MIT Sloan Management Review article.13 Today, for example, a vast majority of firms outsource all or part of their employee tech support and call-center operations, and almost all of high-tech manufacturing is done by a few giant firms based in China, Taiwan, and South Korea. Many firms, having discovered that there were high coordination costs associated with outsourcing to firms in other countries, opted for the middle ground of offshoring, moving work outside the country but often retaining it within their organization through an operating unit based in a country with lower-cost labor.

As a recent study by Shu-Yi Oei and Diane Ring highlights, the regulatory ambiguity that occurs when slotting sharing economy work into existing categories can lead to analogous tax compliance and enforcement gaps on sharing economy platforms.10 For many reasons it is hard to find accurate numbers capturing the exact magnitude of offshoring. Some of these reasons shed light on comparable measurement challenges we can expect as the sharing economy grows. While some jobs can be tracked (e.g., full-time credit card call center positions relocated from the United States to India), other jobs are more difficult to track because it is not jobs per se but rather specific components that are being offshored. For example, as work itself changes, and is increasingly fragmented into hundreds of tasks that are staffed on platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr, it is nearly impossible to measure what percentage of the work in question is being offshored.

As Blinder observes, “It is critical to distinguish between two very different sorts of services … personally delivered (or just “personal”) and impersonally delivered (or just “impersonal”). The first category encompasses a bewildering variety of jobs, ranging from janitors and childcare workers on the low-wage end to surgeons and CEOs on the high-wage end. Similarly, the second category includes both low-end jobs like call center operators and high-end jobs like scientists.”11 What’s key, Blinder maintains, is to focus not on a job’s skill or the educational credentials required to do the job but rather on whether the service in question can be delivered electronically over long distances without compromising quality. As it turns out, while some jobs fall into this category, most do not.


pages: 292 words: 81,699

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

Econ 101 management is the style used by people who know just enough economic theory to be dangerous. The Econ 101 manager assumes that everyone is motivated by money, and that the best way to get people to do what you want them to do is to give them financial rewards and punishments to create incentives. For example, AOL might pay their call-center people for every customer they persuade not to cancel their subscription. A software company might give bonuses to programmers who create the fewest bugs. It works about as well as giving your chickens money to buy their own food. One big problem is that it replaces intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation.

Somehow, the phone companies and the cable companies and the ISPs just don’t understand this equation. They outsource their tech support to the cheapest possible provider and end up paying $10 again and again and again fixing the same problem again and again and again instead of fixing it once and for all in the source code. The cheap call centers have no mechanism for getting problems fixed; indeed, they have no incentive to get problems fixed because their income depends on repeat business, and there’s nothing they like better than being able to give the same answer to the same question again and again. The second implication of fixing everything two ways is that eventually, all the common and simple problems are solved, and what you’re left with is very weird uncommon problems.

Greed will get you nowhere R ecently, I was talking with the people who have been doing most of the customer service for Fog Creek over the last year, and I asked what methods they found most effective for dealing with angry customers. “Frankly,” they said, “we have pretty nice customers. We haven’t really had any angry customers.” Well, OK, we do have nice customers, but it seems rather unusual that in a year of answering the phones, nobody was angry. I thought the nature of working at a call center was dealing with angry people all day long. Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service 253 “Nope. Our customers are nice.” Here’s what I think. I think that our customers are nice because they’re not worried. They’re not worried because we have a ridiculously liberal return policy: “We don’t want your money if you’re not amazingly happy.”


pages: 374 words: 94,508

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

Well, even if my global bank hasn’t figured out how easy it is to monetize customer information, there’s a prime example of one that has. Westpac Bank in Australia has five customer-facing divisions serving some thirteen million customers. Its consumer bank operates a network of over 1,400 branches, third-party distributors and call centers, and nearly four thousand ATMs, along with internet banking services.1 And whereas my bank’s mission statement starts with something hackneyed about “client service,” the number one company value listed on Westpac’s corporate website is “Delighting Customers—by deeply understanding and exceeding expectations.”2 It’s here where Westpac decided to put its money (and information) where its mouth is.

It just didn’t have a complete picture of who each customer was. But under the leadership of Karen Ganschow, general manager of customer relationship marketing, Westpac launched a “KnowMe” program to centralize and analyze all of customer activity—including bank website browsing history, ATM and call center usage, and so forth. “We want to make sure that every time we interact with a customer there is something that is personalised for them,” Ganschow said. “We are trying to use data so that customers will stay engaged with the bank forever.” But she also acknowledged the information-related challenges and opportunities: “Our data sources are growing very fast and customer interactions are growing very fast.

All asset valuation-related methods such as internal rate of return (IRR) or economic value added (EVA), along with all accounting methods for any kind of asset, are based on a set of assumptions. It is important that assumptions are properly described and consistently applied. The models generally work best when treating a class of information (for example, customer data, product data, maintenance data, call center data, or employee data) as a portfolio of information. While it may be easier to apply these models to specific datasets, you will likely find more benefit in applying them to logical groupings (portfolios) of related information assets. Finally, we offer multiple models for various needs and circumstances (Figure 11.1).


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

—A public health parable (adapted from the original, which is commonly attributed to Irving Zola) In 2012, Ryan O’Neill, the head of the customer experience group for the travel website Expedia, had been sifting through some data from the company’s call center. One number he uncovered was so farfetched as to be almost unbelievable. For every 100 customers who booked travel on Expedia—reserving flights or hotel rooms or rental cars—58 of them placed a call afterward for help. The primary appeal of an online travel site, of course, is self-service. No calls necessary. Imagine a gas station that allowed you to swipe a credit card right at the pump—and then, about 60% of the time, something went wrong that forced you to go inside the store for help. That was Expedia. Traditionally, the call center had been managed for efficiency and customer satisfaction.

In Iceland, the campaign leaders engaged the teenagers and almost all the major influences on them: parents, teachers, coaches, and others. Each one had something critical to contribute. By contrast, downstream action is often much narrower. Think of the Expedia example that opened the book: To react to a customer’s call required the effort of just one call-center representative. But to prevent that customer from calling at all required integration among multiple teams of people. Once you’ve surrounded the problem, then you need to organize all those people’s efforts. And you need an aim that’s compelling and important—a shared goal that keeps them contributing even in stressful situations where, as in the next story, people’s lives may depend on your work


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

“Value of Connectivity,” Deloitte, https://www2.deloitte.com/ch/en/pages/technology-media-and-telecommunications/articles/value-of-connectivity.html. 9.Watch the video here: Free Basics Partner Stories: Rappler, https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2016/free-basics-partner-stories-rappler/. 10.The population of the Philippines was 112,579,898 as of July 3, 2022, based on the latest UN data; see “Philippines Population (Live),” Worldometer, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/philippines-population/. 11.David Dizon, “Why Philippines Has Overtaken India as World’s Call Center Capital,” ABS-CBN News, December 2, 2010, https://news.abs-cbn.com/nation/12/02/10/why-philippines-has-overtaken-india-worlds-call-center-capital. 12.Such businesses include Kim Dotcom and his file-sharing site Megaupload, which, according to FBI and US court documents, operated partly from the Philippines. See David Fisher, “Free but $266 Million in Debt: The Deal That Gave the FBI an Inside Man Who Could Testify Against Kim Dotcom,” New Zealand Herald, November 27, 2015, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?

A former colony of the United States, the Philippines’ nearly 113 million people10 boasted of an English-speaking, often college-educated, labor force familiar with Western culture. That’s one reason why our country has long been a source of cheap labor for the West. In 2010, the Philippines overtook India as the world’s top call center, business process outsourcing (BPO), and shared services hub.11 More significantly, we became a prime source of internet scams, from the days of Hotmail and email spam. Many foreign businesses experimenting in gray areas came to the Philippines because it had few or no internet regulations, and what regulations it did have, it didn’t enforce.12 Some parts of the Philippines developed a reputation for services euphemistically known as “onlining” that spammed email addresses around the world.13 Our country was also where the hate factory 8chan, later 8kun, best known as a forum for violent extremists, was based and later linked to QAnon: the American father and son suspected of creating it had been living on a pig farm south of Manila.14 A lot of that changed after a global crackdown between 2010 and 2012, when internet security researchers and law enforcement agencies dismantled spambots and technology evolved to control them.


pages: 168 words: 50,647

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

He liked the one he already had and found working on it meaningful. As of 2015, Facebook’s market capitalization is $230 billion. Thiel and Breyer are both happy to have lost that argument and let Zuckerberg keep working on Facebook.61 Adam Grant, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, found the same phenomenon in an experiment at a call center. He divided up call center representatives into three separate groups. All three groups were making calls for a university fundraising operation. The first group was instructed to read about the personal benefits of the job, such as making money and developing communication skills. The second group read stories about people who had received scholarships from the money raised and how it had improved their lives before hitting the phones .


Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations by Russell Anderson-Williams

business process, call centre, market design, off-the-grid, Skype

[ 37 ] Using Audio Option 2 – different sounds at path points This is without a doubt one of the best ways to add some real flare to your Prezi. By adding sound at certain path points in your Prezi, you can add narration to your story, allow subject matter experts to talk to your audience, or use background noise to help explain certain environments you're discussing, that is, busy warehouses, supermarkets, call centers, and sales floors. The possibilities are all down to your own creativity, but let's get started and get your Prezi doing the talking for you. What you need for Option 2? Just as you did earlier, you'll need to open Windows Live Movie Maker and create a movie file. This time we won't need to convert it to .swf as the standard .wmv format will suffice.

Creating an environment When new members of staff join your business they normally spend a few days in a classroom environment having training. There's a projector and a whiteboard, and for the most part they engage in good conversations with the trainer and each other and learn a lot. But then when they hit the retail shop floor or the sales floor of your busy call center they feel slightly overwhelmed. This is mainly due to the fact that their training environment is very different from the real thing. So why not use sound in your training induction Prezis to create the same kind of atmosphere? It doesn't have to be constant noise throughout the induction but by giving them a flavor of how their working environment will sound, you can help prepare them for the real thing.


pages: 172 words: 49,890

The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns by Mohnish Pabrai

asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business intelligence, call centre, cuban missile crisis, discounted cash flows, Edward Thorp, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, hiring and firing, index fund, inventory management, John Bogle, Mahatma Gandhi, merger arbitrage, passive investing, price mechanism, Silicon Valley, time value of money, transaction costs, two and twenty, zero-sum game

Each of these offices is typically independently owned by a commissioned agent. This distribution overhead costs at least 15 percent of the premiums that State Farm and Allstate charge. GEICO has a near-permanent 15 percent cost advantage—read arbitrage spread—compared to most auto insurers. GEICO sells all its policies directly out of inbound call centers staffed by paid GEICO employees and through geico.com. Both channels cost dramatically less than putting up thousands of brick and mortar storefronts owned by agents—each of whom expect to make at least six, seven, or eight figures annually. The Internet has helped move a growing percentage of sales over geico.com.

At one point, GEICO was likely paying over 25 cents a minute for its toll-free 800 service. Today, I doubt if it costs the company even 1 cent a minute. Its major cost for telephone sales is the staff of thousands of GEICO counselors. Even these could be reduced painlessly through attrition while opening a call center or two in India—increasing the arbitrage spread even more. In a decade or two, most of GEICO’s transactions are likely to be over the Internet at costs approaching zero, and the arbitrage spread will widen further. State Farm and Allstate did not derive these same cost benefits from the Internet or the telephone.


pages: 227 words: 32,306

Using Open Source Platforms for Business Intelligence: Avoid Pitfalls and Maximize Roi by Lyndsay Wise

barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Richard Stallman, Salesforce, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, the market place

available include both traditional BI environments and targeted solutions that are developed to satisfy a specific need or to address a defined business problem. Niche applications also exist that include industry-specific offerings or corporate performance management. But some of the most common BI applications include sales and marketing analytics, call center monitoring, and budgeting and forecasting. For instance, let’s say a small retailer is trying to understand why sales for a particular product has dropped in 2 of their 24 stores but remained steady at the other locations. They might have to look at sales history to identify whether this is normal performance historically, whether circumstances have changed at those two locations, inventory, foot traffic, placement of items, and how these compare to the better performing locations.

Once companies want to understand how finance and accounting intersects with sales and distribution, or how customer satisfaction can be used to up-sell and expand sales, the ability to view information across the organization in a centralized repository becomes essential. 1 In general, data manipulation is not as bad as it sounds. In many companies the concept of customer or membership date can differ. For instance, IT considers other departments’ customers, whereas customer service looks at a customer as a person calling into the call center. Companies that deal with membership may have differing views on when a membership starts. In some cases, it might be when the application is submitted, in other cases it will be when payment is received, while in others it might be when a customer is invoiced. All of these situations mean that different people within businesses have different worldviews and apply separate calculations to their work, resulting in data that is considered “manipulated” to some extent. 82 CHAPTER 8 The strategy behind BI adoption Mitigating risk Another reason organizations look at BI is to help mitigate risk.

Organizations look first to structured content to analyze trends, customer behavior, partner and supplier management, and design marketing campaigns. Even though this information can be complicated, the ability to go beyond the obvious is where other information comes from. Internal unstructured/semistructured data Information contained in emails, documents, call center notes, etc., represent good examples of unstructured content that is increasingly being captured as part of BI initiatives. Organizations are 152 CHAPTER 13 A look at technical considerations trying to identify why customers stay or leave and what their levels of satisfaction are. Because of the increasing competitive nature of the marketplace these days, businesses can no longer ignore multiple types of data sets.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

I called the support center, and they immediately canceled the task and said, ‘Don’t do this. We’ll be in touch with the client.’” Explaining that he’d “come to realize some of the scams that are being pulled through TaskRabbit,” and that he’d encountered such a scam several times, Michael asked the call center about their decision. “They used the same language that I heard in a previous conversation, where there was another definitely scam task. And I can’t remember the language exactly, but it was something like: ‘Well, sometimes people misuse the platform to try to work around a situation,’ or something to that effect.”

A poll conducted in conjunction with the paper’s coverage of the layoffs found that “nearly three-quarters of all households had a close encounter with layoffs” between 1980 and 1996, and that in a third of all households, a family member had lost a job.29 In some cases, the lost jobs were replaced with automation as computers and software made certain jobs and procedures redundant. In other cases, work expectations were simply ratcheted upward as workers, anxious that they would lose their jobs in the next round of layoffs, pushed themselves to do more with less. The layoffs were also used to shed full-time employees, replacing them with outsourced services such as call centers, staffing companies, and perma-temps. The popular business titles of the age are instructive: The Overworked American, Mean Business, Lean and Mean, The White Collar Sweatshop, and The Disposable American.30 This focus on production—and on the expendability of workers—was similar to the early industrial age and the efforts of companies to wring every last minute of work out of their workers.

If the hours/times of work are dictated by the employer or market, the worker is not independent. Having employer-dictated hours is nothing new. Grocery store clerks and retail workers can’t just show up whenever they want—they have set hours. Law-firm attorneys, teachers, accountants, postal workers, emergency room doctors, and call center employees have their hours set by an employer and the market: no one wants their mail to arrive at midnight or to get a telemarketing call at 4 a.m. Some of these jobs also have staffing considerations: we want teachers to be present when students are at school and a certain number of doctors to fulfill the needs of a busy emergency room.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Here complex mathematical models sift through huge amounts of data—more than could ever be stored on a laptop or cell phone—and become skilled at identifying different speech patterns. Over time, they become more adept at recognizing vocabulary, regional accents, colloquialisms, and the context of conversations by analyzing, for example, recordings of call center conversations with customers. The machines are learning. These rapid developments in voice recognition weren’t lost on Jeff Bezos. By the early 2010s, his Prime program had gained traction and was pulling large numbers of customers into the Amazon universe, but he was looking for the next big tool to keep his AI flywheel spinning ever faster.

McKinsey is also quick to point out that economic growth is likely to offset the numbers of jobs lost because of increased spending on health care, and growing investment in infrastructure, energy, and technology. It might be true that the economy will eventually replace those jobs, but in the interim a scenario where nearly a third of the world’s workers will be forced to seek new jobs is chilling. It stretches the imagination to believe that the legions of warehouse workers, call center agents, grocery cashiers, retail clerks, and truck drivers who lose their jobs to automation will quickly and easily learn to become computer programmers, solar energy installers, or home care providers. The global economy may eventually generate enough new jobs to replace the 800 million lost, but the disruption in the meantime will be immense.

But as we shall see, the wage hike was both a brilliant public relations move and—remember this is Bezos, one of the most competitive people in the world—a tactic that put his competitors at a disadvantage. For most Amazon workers, that raise was welcome, but for some, the boost to $15 an hour came at a cost. As part of the deal, the company would cut out restricted stock units for call center and warehouse employees as well as monthly incentive-based pay bonuses for warehouse workers tied to production goals. Some workers complained in the press that the raise was at best a wash, and others complained that they’d actually lose money on the deal. When those press reports reached the desk of Dave Clark, he told his team to find those workers who were disadvantaged by the decision and make sure they were made whole.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The Western countries have pushed poor countries to eliminate trade barriers, but kept up their own barriers, preventing developing countries from exporting their agricultural products and so depriving them of desperately needed export income.”11 Free trade in goods triggered the initial backlash by low- and middle-skilled manufacturing workers in advanced economies. For example, auto industry workers lost their jobs when factories moved to Mexico and other nations with cheaper labor. Disaffection has spilled into a much larger services sector. At the low end, workers in low-wage economies started manning call centers. Increasingly, law firms farm out document reviews. Accountants in Poland can do US tax returns at a fraction of the cost. Technicians anywhere can read medical imagery. And computer programmers all over the world can provide their services to Silicon Valley. All this economic and sociocultural dislocation led to rising opposition to global population migration.

A similar fate will increasingly hurt low- and semi-skilled white collar service workers where virtual access can substitute for physical presence. With a few months of training and no language barriers to worry about, virtual counterparts in emerging markets can fill many service jobs remotely. Middle-class security offers no refuge from competition. Call centers come to mind first, but accountants, lawyers, and even doctors may increasingly face virtual competition. Rivals in China and Asia have proliferated. Even if jobs are secure, job candidates will multiply, easing pressure on employers to raise pay. Indeed, with 2.5 billion citizens in China and India, dubbed Chindians, and many more in other emerging markets joining the global labor force, workers in advanced economies need to beware.

“Telemigrants” in countries with low wages can perform the same jobs as millions of higher-paid service workers in advanced economies. When accountants in the United States join the ranks of factory workers who watched their jobs go abroad, should we impose trade restrictions on foreign accountants? On insurance agents? On money managers and lawyers? Or computer programmers? Or call center service workers? Initially, workers in poor economies will compete with service workers in advanced economies. Over time, robots or globots will replace service workers everywhere. They take no lunch breaks, bathroom breaks, vacations, and at least in the foreseeable future they won’t demand raises.


pages: 341 words: 99,495

Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully by Kelly Starrett, Juliet Starrett

airport security, call centre, COVID-19, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microdosing, Minecraft, phenotype, place-making, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

In 2016, researchers at Texas A&M Health Science Center, School of Public Health, published a study that looked at productivity in call center workers provided with sit-stand desks over the course of six months. Half of the 167 participants were provided with the adjustable desks while half had regular desks and desk chairs. The standers—who ended up sitting 1.6 hours less per day than their counterparts—showed themselves to be increasingly more productive than the sitters (based on the success of their calls), beginning at 23 percent more productivity the first month and 53 percent more productivity at six months. The standers also reported less body discomfort. The call center standers’ productivity squares with what we know about kids who use stand-up desks: Standing is associated with significant improvements in executive function and working-memory capabilities in students.

Dunstan, David W., Shilpa Dogra, Sophie E. Carter, and Neville Owen. “Sit Less and Move More for Cardiovascular Health: Emerging Insights and Opportunities.” Nature Reviews Cardiology 18 (September 2021): 637–48. DOI: 10.1038/​s41569-021-00547-y. Garrett, Gregory, Mark Benden, Ranjana Mehta, et al. “Call Center Productivity Over 6 Months Following a Standing Desk Intervention.” IIE Transactions on Occupational Ergonomics and Human Factors 4, no. 2–3 (2016): 188–95. DOI: 10.1080/​21577323.2016.1183534. Harrell, Eben. “How 1% Performance Improvements Led to Olympic Gold.” Harvard Business Review, October 30, 2015.


pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

Israel once had a phone fracas with a United Airlines support person who admitted admit he had never been inside an airport. Very few customers have much love for any of those options. We don’t like being relegated to navigating automated answering decision trees. We don’t like waiting for 20 minutes to talk to someone in a call center, where people are trained to find the quickest possible way to get the customer off the phone. We want a sympathetic person who can understand our issues and solve them simply and promptly. We had come to the point where we had just about given up on this issue. We had resigned ourselves to a lifetime of mediocre service.

The 2 Percent Intrusion If most people hate most marketing most of the time, why are we all inundated with these ads? Shel Israel learned the answer back in 1995 when he worked for a large PR agency, and MCI, a now-defunct telecom company, was his client. The company pushed its discount phone service by having call center employees phone people at home at dinnertime. Israel told his client that every time he mentioned MCI in conversations, people became irate, because they hated those intrusive calls. The client confided he, too, had the same experience. Sometimes it got so bad that he avoided disclosing who he worked for.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Employees contribute complementary skills and take on complementary roles. They learn how to work together. It’s bad news when a good one goes. The management of employee turnover is a significant challenge for all companies. For example, another multinational corporation looked to decrease turnover among customer service agents at a call center in Barcelona. Folks would come just to spend the summer in that beautiful city and then suddenly give notice and split. It would help to identify such job applicants in advance. In this endeavor, the organization is aiming PA inwardly to predict its own staff’s behavior, in contrast to the more common activity of predicting its patrons’ behavior.

Across all of HP, promotions do decrease Flight Risk, but within this Sales Compensation team, where a number of promotions had been associated with relatively low raises, the effect was reversed: Those employees who had been promoted more times were more likely to quit, unless a more significant pay hike had gone along with the promotion. The analysis is only as good as the data (garbage in, garbage out). In a similar but unrelated project for another company, I predictively modeled how long new prospective hires for a Fortune 1000 B2B provider of credit information would stay on if hired for call center staffing. Candidates with previous outbound sales experience proved 69 percent more likely to remain on the job at least nine months. Other factors included the number of jobs in the past decade, the referring source of the applicant, and the highest degree attained. This project dodged a land mine, as preliminary results falsely showed new hires without a high school degree were 2.6 times as likely to stay on the job longer.

One time, I was sifting and organizing an online service’s data in preparation to predict which customers would intentionally cancel their subscriptions. Along the way I noticed a major leak in the boat. Tons of customers were involuntarily canceling due to credit card failures on their monthly or quarterly membership dues. One processing error message arose for many of these cases: “Hold—call center.” This meant the merchant should keep holding the credit card and call in to see if the payment’s authorization could be completed with some additional steps. Since the transactions were automatic—no merchant was physically holding a card—these customers just slipped through the cracks and were lost.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Every time we ask for our salary there is a dispute.”1 Wage theft goes hand in hand with contractualization, Atienza explains. “Contractualization” makes it difficult for workers to turn to the government for help, because labor laws protect only “full-time, permanent” employees. Most workers in fast food and at call centers (another big employer of Filipinos under thirty) are classified as “temporary” or “contract” labor. This is true even if they have worked for the same company for years. RESPECT and SENTRO are fighting hard for legislation to guarantee predictable schedules, and long-term security for all Filipino workers.

See also farmworkers Brazil: court case against Arcos Dorados, 73–74; port and oil workers’ work stoppages in, 73; Senate hearings on McDonald’s, 9, 36; struggles over land ownership, 182 Brito, Santa, 25–26, 83–85 Brooks, Kwanza, 100–101 Brown, Michael, 72 Buckner, Ann, 65 Burrow, Sharan, 54 Bustos, Edwin, 24 Butler, Laphonza, 27, 81 BYD (electric-vehicle manufacturer), 242 Cabot Creamery (Agri-Mark), 197 Cáceres, Berta, 43, 46 California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, 16 California United Long-Term Care Workers Union, 27 call center workers, 100 Cambodia: beer promoters, 17–20; destruction of small farms in, 184; “fast fashion”/garment industry, 123–26, 149–50; Food and Service Workers’ Federation (CFSWF), 18–19; hotel housekeepers, 22; Pol Pot regime, 155; responses to garment worker protests, 128, 151–53, 158; Tonlé apparel manufacturing, 250–51; urban population growth, 161.

See also social movement activism Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW): assistance for the organizers of the San Quintín berry pickers, 214; on employer conducted safety checks, 119; gains for tomato field-workers, 194–95; organizing model, global applications, 195; strategic approach, 194 Cochran, Jim, 246–48 collective ownership, 244–46 Collins, Barbara, 111–12 Communist Manifesto (Marx), 86 community benefits agreements (CBAs), 254, 256–57, 258 community benefits movement, 256–57 conflict minerals, 50 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 97 Conklin, Wim, 155 consciousness-raising/peer discussions: education using, 58, 160, 210; empowerment from, 56, 224; and global organizing efforts, 147. See also education construction workers, hazards faced by, 22 consumers: consumer boycotts, 41, 216; educating, 158–59, 164; and fast-fashion industry, 129; focusing actions on, 194, 210–11; and ubiquity of low prices, 6; and ready availability of fresh produce, 220 contract labor: call center workers, 100; fast-food workers, 99–100; fostering solidarity among, 66–67; garment workers, 177; and the “gig” economy, 68; grape pickers, 209; and low wages, 67–68; as product of globalization, 68, 167; as strategy for avoiding corporate responsibility, 177; teachers, 66, 79, 91 Contreras, Miguel, 254 Conway, Jill Ker, 130 Cooper Union, New York, 37 Cordillera region, Philippines: heirloom rice project, 231, 233; indigenous farming communities, 227, 232; migration from, 232; traditional agroecology practices, rice rituals, 230–31; as a UNESCO “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Site,” 231 corn production, Mexico, impact of NAFTA, 15–16 Corona, Bert (“El Viejo”), 94 Coronacion, Joanna Bernice (“Sister Nice”): concept of freedom, 12; on contractualizing fast-food workers, 99; and DUBS, 63; education, 48–49; on globalized social movement activism, 97; on need to dismantle patriarchy, 48; on wage theft, 101 corporations/transnational corporate imperialism: and corporate wealth, 4–5; and industrialized agribusiness, 13–14; and neoliberalism, 5.


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Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

The IRS doesn’t arrest people for small tax bills, and if it did, it would not use local police forces to do so. For an excellent report on a massive India-based call-center scam that resulted in the 2016 indictment and arrest of hundreds of people in the United States and abroad for stealing tens of millions of dollars with calls like these, see “Scam Likely,” Season 4 of the podcast Chameleon (Campside Media, 2022) [https://www.campsidemedia.com/shows/chameleon-scam-likely]; US indictment of 61 people and entities [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/dozens-individuals-indicted-multimillion-dollar-indian-call-center-scam-targeting-us-victims]. 14. Binjamin Wilkomirski affair: S. Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth (New York: Schocken, 2001); “Fragments of a Fraud,” Guardian, October 14, 1999 [https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/oct/15/features11.g24].

When a source presents itself as objective and fair (like faux-centrist BipartisanReport.com, which first posted the Gorsuch story), we’re more susceptible to deception. Anything presented by an authority—assuming the recipient recognizes and respects the source—has a head start on being accepted as true or worth obeying. This is one reason why a common “call-center scam” involves telling victims that they owe money to a tax authority (such as the US Internal Revenue Service), immigration agency, or other government entity and that law enforcement will come right away to serve an arrest warrant unless the bill is paid over the phone.13 The power of the source in amplifying our truth bias is even more potent when we find the storyteller to be sympathetic.


Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris

big-box store, call centre, David Sedaris, desegregation, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, remote working, stem cell

But you can’t pick things out—a man’s face, for example, watching from the sidelines when, for the first time in your life, you pull ahead and win. A Friend in the Ghetto I was in London, squinting out my kitchen window at a distant helicopter, when a sales rep phoned from some overseas call center. “Mr. Sedriz?” he asked. “Is that who I have the pleasure of addressing?” The man spoke with an accent, and though I couldn’t exactly place it, I knew that he was poor. His voice had snakes in it. And dysentery, and mangoes. “I am hoping this morning to interest you in a cell phone,” he announced.

Or a raccoon, or a mongoose, or a honey badger. As weeks passed and the cell phone salesman didn’t call back, I started worrying that he’d lost his job. Maybe, though, that’s just me being a cultural elitist, assuming that his life must go from bad to worse. Isn’t it just as likely that he got promoted or, better still, that he left the call center for greener pastures? That’s it, I tell myself. Once he settles into the new job and moves into that house he’s been eyeing, after his maid has left for the day and he’s figured out which remote works the television and which one is for the DVD player, he’s going to need someone to relate to. Then he’ll dig up my number, reach for his cell phone, and, by God, call me.


pages: 223 words: 60,936

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere by Tsedal Neeley

Airbnb, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discrete time, Donald Trump, future of work, global pandemic, iterative process, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lockdown, mass immigration, natural language processing, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Silicon Valley, social distancing

A group of economists teamed up to assess the benefits that work-from-home practices can have on performance and productivity at China’s largest travel agency, Ctrip. One of the study authors, James Liang, was a cofounder of the company, and thus had a vested interest in this question. Interestingly, when they asked 996 employees from the Shanghai call center if they were interested in working from home, about half expressed interest, but only 249 met the company qualifications of having at least a six-month tenure, broadband technology, and a private workspace to do their job at home. The scholars randomly chose to study 125 employees who worked from home, while the other half continued to go to the office.

When this question was posed to 273 employees who worked from home in sales, marketing, accounting, and engineering, the researchers found that highly complex jobs that did not require social support were more conducive to remote work than collocated work. This study also found that low-complexity jobs that did not require much interactive collaboration, such as call centers, were more productive when working from home. Even for workers whose jobs were more interactive, the researchers found no negative correlations between remote work and job performance. In other words, remote work doesn’t significantly hurt job performance in any type of work. For some job features, performance is better with more extensive virtual work, and in others, the impact is neutral.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

The northern boomtown of Monterrey has doubled in population to 4.5 million over the last thirty years and become a center of manufacturing innovation that is spreading across the country. In central Mexico, Querétaro is a jack-of-all-trades, making everything from wine to appliances and trucks, as well as offering services from call centers to logistics. León, once known as the city of shoes and leather, was hard hit by Chinese competition but responded by shifting to agro-industry, chemicals, and cars. Aguascalientes is home to Toyota’s most modern manufacturing plant outside Japan. Farther south the city of Puebla has a large Volkswagen plant.

This unique “missing middle” is quite astonishing even for a relatively undeveloped country—the Philippines’ average income is less than $3,000. However, signs of life have emerged in second cities like Cebu and Bacolod, which have seen their populations grow by 25 percent since 2000 and are starting to attract some of the call centers and IT service companies that have become an important pillar of the economy. In the developed world, there are only two countries with more than 100 million people, and they have vastly different track records for developing second-tier cities. Since 1985 fifteen cities in the United States have grown to have more than one million people, while in Japan the comparable number is one, Hamamatsu, an industrial city about 160 miles southwest of Tokyo, which grew in part by absorbing surrounding towns in 2005.

In India, only about two million people work in IT services, or less than 1 percent of the workforce. Smaller copycat IT service booms have occurred in the neighboring countries of Pakistan and Sri Lanka, but those have produced jobs only in the tens of thousands. The same applies to the Philippines, where employment in the booming call center industry exploded from zero to more than 350,000 employees in the 2000s, but that still represents a tiny fraction of the workforce. So far the rise of these service industries has not been big enough to drive the mass modernization of rural farm economies. In the Asian miracle economies of Japan and South Korea, as much as a quarter of the population migrated from farm to factory during their long periods of rapid growth.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

So let’s revisit those keywords from the beginning of this section, but from the context of Chatbots . What happens to the employment of existing call center workers with Chatbots? By 2020, Gartner predicts that this type of conversation automation will manage 85% of businesses’ customer relationships (Busby, 2016). How many people will this potentially effect? Just in the US alone, 5 million people are employed in call centers, while in countries like India and the Philippines, call centers provide employment to millions of people. So what impact will this one technology have on income inequality, wages, and poverty levels when it replaces labor?


pages: 302 words: 82,233

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Finally, degrading safety further, many of these networks and systems contain legacy applications and operating systems that make it difficult to secure the payment data. Merchant systems Internet E-commerce application Back-office applications Fraud detection systems Customer service applications Consumer Third-party systems Payment gateway Fulfillment Acquiring (merchant) bank Call centers Issuing bank Card networks FIGURE 5-1. Credit card data proliferation But what if we took another approach? What happens when we throw out a lot of today’s assumptions around electronic payments and e-commerce and assume that the merchant shouldn’t have to store the data at all? What if we never even handed this sensitive information over to the merchant in the first place?

Connecting People, Process, and Technology: The Potential for Business Process Management Virtually every company will be going out and empowering their workers with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes, thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before. —Bill Gates New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an excellent book in 2005 called The World Is Flat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) in which he explored the outsourcing revolution, from call centers in India and tax form processing in China to radiography analysis in Australia. I live Friedman’s flat world today; in fact, I am sitting on a plane to Hyderabad to visit part of my development team as I write this text. My current team is based in the United States (Redmond), Europe (London and Munich), India (Hyderabad), and China (Beijing).

The effect is similar to the effects of global commerce, which takes away the advantage of renting storefront property on your town’s busy Main Street or opening a bank office near a busy seaport or railway station. Tasks are routed by sophisticated business rules engines that determine whether a call center message should be routed to India or China, or whether the cheapest supplier for a particular good has the inventory in stock. BPM software changes the very composition of supply chains, providing the ability to dynamically reconfigure a supply chain based on dynamic business conditions. Business transactions take place across many companies under conditions ranging from microseconds to many years.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Moffitt, “Childhood Forecasting of a Small Segment of the Population with Large Economic Burden,” Nature Human Behaviour 1, no. 1 (2017): article no. UNSP 0005. 50. Mary Shacklett, “How Artificial Intelligence Is Taking Call Centers to the Next Level,” Tech Pro Research, June 12, 2017, http://www.techproresearch.com/article/how-artificial-intelligence-is-taking-call-centers-to-the-next-level/. 51. For an extraordinary chronicling of the problems generated by edtech, see Audrey Watters, “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade,” Hacked Education (blog), http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow. 52.

These conversational fillers disguise the power of a firm like Google with the hesitation or deference typically expressed by a human’s unpolished speech. They cloak a robocall as a human inquiry. For those on the receiving end of the calls, it is all too easy to imagine abuse: a deluge of calls from robotized call centers. Counterfeiting humanity is not merely deceptive, it is also unfair, giving the counterfeiter the benefit of the appearance of personal support and interest without its reality. As we will see in case after case—of robot teachers, soldiers, customer-service representatives, and more—dissatisfaction and distress at failed imitations of humanity are not merely the result of imperfect technology.


pages: 405 words: 112,470

Together by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.

Airbnb, call centre, cognitive bias, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, gentrification, gig economy, income inequality, index card, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, medical residency, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, stem cell, TED Talk, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

And she doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be able to maintain her independence. “It’s a bit of a lost feeling,” she says. “Wow, mortality has always been there. But it always seemed so far off.” It makes her feel lonely to face it alone. Sophie Andrews is well acquainted with seniors like Anne. Andrews is the president of Silver Line, a call center for the elderly in the UK whose motto is: “No question too big, no problem too small, no need to be alone.” The Silver Line has fielded two million calls since starting in 2013 with the number of calls increasing 10 percent every month, all by word of mouth. “There’s such a stigma to loneliness,” she said.

See also support services AA sponsorship as, 168–69 bonds formed through, 181–82 Cole on, 165, 166–68 Eisenberger on brain activity and, 166 faith traditions on, 164, 165 Gandhi on, 165 Islam, 165 purpose in, 167, 169 role, in religion, 164 social connection and, 165 stress response decrease in, 166 therapeutic role of, 168 therapeutic state of relief from, 167 types of, 166–67 well-being increase in, 166 widows, loneliness and, 166 Shakespeare, William, 58 shame Brown on, 91 family and incarceration, 91–93 in female loneliness, 91–93 from loneliness, xviii–xix of opioid addiction, xv shared space, Lederach on, 213 sharing meals, friendships and, 212–16 Sharp, Ronald, 217 shift, in social networks, 101 Shultz, Susanne, 29–30 Silver Line call center for elderly, in UK, 131–32 singing, Dunbar on, 225–26 single population, in Asia, 128 situational loneliness, 41 sleep, loneliness impact on, 39 Smart and Secure Children (SSC) parent leadership program, 272–73 smartphones Anderson on children use of, 256 Asia Travel Frog game, 128 multitasking myth and, 106 quality conversations negatively impacted by, 109 Smith, Ace, 244–50 Smith, Christian, 165 social acceptance, 251 social and professional use, of social media, 105 social anxiety, 48 Lloyd on depression, loneliness and, 44–47 trauma and, 173 social behavior, digital technology and adolescent, 103 social connection, xix childhood resilience impacted by, 175–76 culture of kindness link to, 75–76 female loneliness reliance on, 176 health impacted by, 5–7 Holt-Lunstad health study for, 12–15 lifespan impact from, 12–14 loneliness and, 8 in Okinawa, Japan, 77 personality impact on, 8 protective factor of, 13 service and, 165 Tait on, 120 social exclusion, 252 social geography, disconnection and, 135 social isolation, of adolescents, 244–47, 249–50 academic performance study and, 251–52 bullying compared to, 248 The Social Leap (von Hippel), 30 social media, 255 befriending of self and, 196 behavior, brain science understanding in, 105 comparisons and, 112–13 depression and anxiety impacted by, 257 empathy and, 110 on enemy perception, 138 loneliness and, xv peer connection and, 258 Primack on high levels of, 103–4 social and professional use of, 105 validation seeking and, 102 social networks elderly population decrease of, 130 estrangement from erosion of, 100 immigrants and, 124–25 modern progress advances impact on, 98 Putnam on erosion of, 97 shift in, 101 social neuroscience, 28 social norm, of reciprocity, 164 social outcasts, 10–11 social prescribing, 16 social terms, of culture of connection, 60–69 social threats Cacioppo, S., on, 41 Cole on, 49 societal change, evolution of loneliness and, 95–96 solitude, 211 art and, 208 Cain on reading and, 208 creativity and intimacy from, 205 digital technology impact on, 113 heart action in, 207 loneliness compared to, 9 music and, 208 in nature, 208 power of gratitude and love in, 207 relationship of self and, 205–8 self-reflection and, 206 as voluntary isolation, 9 Space Gathering, of Bian, 192–93, 215, 216 Bolnick on, 194 SSC.

., 27–29, 185–86 therapeutic role, of service to others, 168 therapeutic state of relief, from service to others, 167 therapy support groups, 225 3Wishes Project, 20–23 Togetherness Program, of CareMore, 16–19 touch Dunbar on, 222 endorphins released during, 222 trail, of evolution of loneliness, 29–32 transactional relationships, 217 trauma ACEs and, 174–75 BBBS and, 177–78 bullying and, 178–81 mask of loneliness and, 173–82 social anxiety and, 173 Werner study on resilience from, 175–77 Travel Frog smartphone game, in Asia, 128 trust infant perceptual narrowing, 36 of infants, 35–36 Lederach on, 138 Turkle, Sherry on conversation and digital technology, 109 on empathy and digital technology, 111 Twenge, Jean, 251–52 UCLA loneliness scale, 10 Uhls, Yalda, 261 on empathy and digital technology, 110–11 UK. See United Kingdom Undercover Agents of Kindness, of Parmenter, 267–70 understanding emotions, as RULER skill, 263 Under Western Eyes (Conrad), 151 United Kingdom (UK) on loneliness, 14–16 Men’s Shed Association in, 87 Silver Line call center for elderly in, 131–32 United States (US), elderly social services in, 129–30 universal condition, of loneliness, xx University of Chicago, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, 28–29 Upanishads, on sacrifice, 164 US. See United States validation seeking, social media and, 102 values female loneliness and cultural, 94–95 modern culture, connections impacted by, xvii veterans bond of, 151–52 Cacioppo, J., and S., on social resilience of, 163 military code of toughness, 153 video conference of moai, 79 positive attributes of, 114 Village Movement, for elderly population, 132–34 violence anger expression of, 159–60 loneliness connection with, 156–68 vital function, of loneliness, 23 von Hippel, Bill, 30 Waldinger, Robert, 221–22 Wang, Helen, 267–68 Way, Niobe, 88–89, 90 way station models, 114–15 PMG as, 117–20 We Dine Together program, for compassion, 270–71 Weinstein, Netta on digital screen time, 103, 256–57 on smartphones and conversations, 109 Weinzweig, Ari, 233–36 well-being culture of kindness and, 163 emotional, xix, 15–16 service to others increase in, 166 Werner, Emmy on belonging and attachment importance, 176 childhood resilience study of, 175–77 Western culture, privacy and independence in, 57–60 Western Europe, oneliness and aloneness in, 58 white nationalism, Black and Stevenson experience of, 142–45, 147 WHO.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

The converging technologies and economic forces that inspired Frederick Taylor to invent scientific management find pure and too often sinister expression on America’s highways and in the cabs of her trucks. In industries where competition is intense and workers interchangeable, the result—stressful working conditions that push people to their limit—is more or less inevitable under current U.S. labor laws. You see this again and again in industries as varied as trucking, call centers, and fast-food outlets. Wherever it’s relatively easy for new companies to enter an industry, the people doing the labor required can be trained in just a few weeks, and individual businesses compete on cost instead of quality, companies will subject employees to conditions that lead to high turnover.

A critical difference between the stack ranking of white-collar workers and the rate system imposed on blue-collar workers is that while companies can ill-afford to lose employees whose skills are in demand, shedding workers who are easily replaced is often a company’s explicit goal. This is almost certainly why one of these systems has died out and the other persists. This practice is hardly limited to Amazon. It’s common across a huge swath of jobs requiring little training, as Emily discovered when she also worked at a call center and a McDonald’s. According to the accounts of many workers who spent years at Amazon, the rate they must hit from one day to the next fluctuates, but overall it’s gradually going up. This results in all kinds of perverse incentives. “The percentile curve is just based off of what everyone is doing right now,” says Tyler Hamilton, the picker and stower at Amazon’s Shakopee, Minnesota, fulfillment center.

But as management consultants latched on to it and engineers who understood it took on leadership roles at other companies, it spread. Every endeavor undertaken by a group of humans, it seemed, could be “lean-ized,” just as everything, Taylor’s disciples had declared, could be Taylorized. Soon after it came to the West in the 1980s, kaizen popped up everywhere, in the management of seemingly everything, from health care to call centers. For Amazon, Marc realized, the equivalents of Toyota’s shop floor were the fulfillment centers where the company received, stored, packed, and shipped its goods. But Amazon’s shop floor also included the trucks that drove those goods to the fulfillment center in the first place, and the last-mile delivery of goods from the warehouse to the customer.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

But a few outsourced services were what businesses like to call customer-facing. Some ransomware groups shared a call center in India, with representatives contacting employees or clients of victim organizations that hadn’t paid up. Following a script provided by the hackers, the callers would describe the incident to the people on the other end of the line—who in some cases weren’t even aware an attack had taken place—and then pressure them to convince the victim organization to pay. While it’s not clear whether REvil used this same Indian call center, Unknown did say in his interview with Smilyanets that direct calls provide “a very good result,” adding, “We call each target as well as their partners and journalists—the pressure increases significantly.”

He didn’t bother to run his idea by the Ransomware Hunting Team or by other security researchers on a Slack channel he’d joined to brainstorm ways to protect essential services from cybercriminals. “This was all me.” The next morning, Lawrence awoke to a flurry of replies. Responding first, the DoppelPaymer gang agreed to his proposal. DoppelPaymer said that they “always try to avoid hospitals, nursing homes, [and 911 call centers], not only now.” If they hit a hospital by mistake, they would “decrypt for free.” Still, realizing that Lawrence would make their pledge public on BleepingComputer, DoppelPaymer warned other victims against posing as healthcare providers to avoid paying a ransom: “We’ll do double, triple check before releasing decrypt for free.”


pages: 204 words: 67,922

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

The jobs they tend to displace don’t involve much independent thought, but rather raw computational or processing ability. They get rid of these low-skilled jobs in two ways: (1) by doing them themselves (e.g., through voice recognition phone trees); and (2) by allowing others in lower-wage labor markets to do them for us (as in the much maligned and much celebrated call centers in India). The result is that the jobs created over the last forty years have not gotten more specific; they have actually gotten broader.36With computerization, we are not, on average, rendered into mindless number punchers. Rather, computers have taken over many rote tasks, and instead, we need to be able to synthesize, process, and draw abstractions from the increasing amounts of data that are presented to us.

It’s not that our jobs have necessarily gotten harder, but the increase in variance in our everyday tasks and the fact that they require more mental concentration and cognitive skills may be quite stress-inducing. There is always a new surprise just around the corner for the knowledge worker. The boring jobs that can be delegated to computers have been. Others that can’t have been outsourced to low-wage labor markets (the famous Indian call centers), thanks to telecommunications technologies. The only low-skilled jobs that really remain in the United States are those which involve personal contact that cannot be performed from afar. It’s no surprise that the fastest-growing low-wage occupations are food service preparation, followed by home health care workers.37 After all, you can’t very well get a computer or a call service center to wipe your incontinent grandmother or serve her three hot meals a day.


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Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliott Morris

affirmative action, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, data science, Donald Trump, Francisco Pizarro, green new deal, lockdown, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, random walk, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, statistical model, Works Progress Administration

And while the polls on average are relatively unbiased, they are fantastically bad in some situations. But part of the reason we’re mad at polls is that there is a misunderstanding between the public and the pollsters—and between the pollsters and the press who cover their calculations. Many pollsters, with their fancy algorithms, “big data,” call centers, and statistical wizardry, have done a poor job conveying the methods they use to arrive at their estimates and the conditions under which these estimates are invalidated. The press has done a poor job trying to understand these nuances, instead simply repeating misleading claims about too-narrow margins of error and hyping the ability of polls to predict the outcome of an electoral horse race.

The internet offers a multitude of new approaches to measuring the average American. DIALING VERSUS DIAL-UP Polling firms that conduct their surveys online can collect interviews from thousands of Americans very quickly, and usually at a fraction of the cost of telephone polls. They do not have to hire people to punch in tens of thousands of cell phone numbers at a call center. There are many ways to recruit participants; you can pay people to visit your website and give them polls to fill out, advertise a survey on social media platforms, and send emails or text messages directing people to an online link. Many people will even give you their data for free, or treat survey-taking as a sort of game to pass the time, usually in exchange for a chance to win a prize.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

Microsoft, among other companies, is working to close that digital divide. But broadband access does not automatically engender sustainable employment opportunities. For example, call center jobs enabled by the Internet offer little stability: in recent years, hundreds of thousands of these jobs have vanished from low-income US communities, most of them transferred to lower-wage nations like the Philippines and India. “We can’t rely on old ideas—like call centers, we must create value around new possibilities,” Hackbert said. “The most exciting enterprises are making it up as they go along, they’re comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.”

Justin Burton was just one of many young people I met in Kentucky who saw themselves as part of this cycle. The opportunity to use their hands as well as their heads—in craft workshops, breweries and distilleries, small farms, specialty food production, sustainable forestry, and the trades—seemed a hopeful alternative to low-wage service jobs in hospitals, factories, and call centers. David Tipton, Berea’s dean of labor, said that regardless of the short-term success of these and similar efforts, over the long term they are a critical part of the essential task of reinventing work in the region. “Jobs are just jobs,” he told me. “If you cultivate a certain skill, and there are no jobs related to that skill, well, you’re just out of luck.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

*There’s usually a ritual in place to make sure everything possible is done to avoid actual human involvement for as long as possible, even if it is inevitable. The cliché we’ve all lived through is that you call about, say, a problem in how an insurance or credit rating Siren Server has screwed up a key decision about your life. Perhaps you were denied coverage for needed medical treatment. After an hours-long battle with the maze of a robo call center, you finally talk to a real person, probably in India or the Philippines. This might be the first time real human eyes associated with the Siren Server have perceived your data. However Amazon is also exploring how to get non-elite service jobs out of the way of the Siren Servers of the future.

Brian, 169n artificial hearts, 157–58 artificial intelligence (AI), 23, 61, 94, 95, 114, 116, 136, 138n, 147, 155, 157, 178, 191, 192–93, 325, 330, 354, 359n artificial memory, 35 art market, 108 Art of the Long View, The (Schwartz), 214 ashrams, 213 assets, 31, 60 “As We May Think” (Bush), 221n asymmetry, 54–55, 61–66, 118, 188, 203, 246–48, 285–88, 291–92, 310 Athens, 22–25 atomic bomb, 127 “attractor nightmare,” 48 auctions, 170, 286 aulos, 23n austerity, 96, 115, 125, 151, 152, 204, 208 authenticity, 128–32, 137 authors, 62n automata, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 automated services, 62, 63, 64, 147–48 automated trading systems, 74–78, 115 automation, 7, 85, 123–24, 192, 234, 259, 261, 343 automobiles, 43, 86, 90–92, 98, 118–19, 125n, 302, 311, 314, 343, 367 avatar cameras, 265 avatars, 89n, 265, 283–85 baby boomers, 97–100, 339, 346 bailouts, financial, 45, 52, 60, 74–75, 82 Baird-Murray, Kathleen, 200n “Ballad of John Henry, The,” 134–35 bandwidth, 171–72 banking, 32–33, 42, 43, 69, 76–78, 151–52, 251, 269n, 289, 345–46 bankruptcy, 2, 89, 251 bargains, 64–65, 95–96 Barlow, John Perry, 353 Barnes & Noble, 62n, 182 barter system, 20, 57 Battlestar Galactica, 137, 138n “beach fantasy,” 12–13, 18, 236–37, 331, 366–67 Beatles, 211, 212, 213 behavior models, 32, 121, 131, 173–74, 286–87 behavior modification, 173–74 Belarus, 136 belief systems, 139–40 Bell, Gordon, 313 bell curve distribution, 39, 39–45, 204, 208, 262, 291–93 Bell Labs, 94 Bentham, Jeremy, 308n Berners-Lee, Tim, 230 Bezos, Jeff, 352 big business, 265–67, 297–98 big data, 107–40, 150, 151–52, 155, 179, 189, 191–92, 202–4, 265–66, 297–98, 305, 346, 366, 367 big money, 202–4, 265–67 billboards, 170, 267, 310 billing, 171–72, 184–85 Bing, 181–82 biodiversity, 146–47 biological realism, 253–54 biotechnology, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 Bitcoin, 34n BitTorrent, 223 blackmail, 61, 172–73, 207, 273, 314, 316, 322 Black Monday, 74 blogs, 118n, 120, 225, 245, 259, 349, 350 books, 1–2, 62, 63, 65, 113, 182, 192, 193, 246–47, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 bots, 62, 63, 64, 147–48 brain function, 195–96, 260, 328 brain scans, 111–12, 218, 367 Brand, Stewart, 214 brand advertising, 267 Brandeis, Louis, 25, 208 Brazil, 54 Brooks, David, 326 Burma, 200n Burning Man, 132 Bush, George H. W., 149 Bush, Vannevar, 221n business data, 112–13, 150, 189 business plans, 107–8, 117–20, 154, 169–74, 175, 236, 258, 301–2, 344–45 cached data mirrors, 223 Cage, John, 212 California, University of, at Berkeley, 104, 107–8, 111, 172 call centers, 177n Caltech, 94, 184 Cambridge, Mass., 157–58 cameras, 2, 10, 89, 265, 309–11, 319 capital flows, 37, 43–45, 47, 49, 201, 329, 355–56 capitalism, 11, 16–17, 20, 43–46, 47, 49, 66–67, 79, 208, 243, 246–48, 258, 260–63, 272, 273n, 277, 329 capital resources, 86 “captured” populations, 170–71 carbon credits, 87, 88, 298–99, 300, 301–3, 314 cartels, 158 Catholic Church, 190 cell phones, 34n, 39, 85, 87, 162, 172, 182n, 192, 229, 269n, 273, 314, 315, 331 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 199–200 chance, 23n change acceleration, 10, 21, 130–33, 136, 193–95, 217 chaos, 165–66, 273n, 331 cheating, 120, 335 Chicago, Ill., 47 China, 54, 70, 85, 87, 199, 200, 201, 208 Christianity, 190, 193–94, 293 Christian Science, 293 civility, 293–94 civilization, 123, 255, 300, 311, 336 civil liberties, 317–24 classified ads, 177n click-through counts, 183, 286, 347 clothing, 89, 260, 367 Cloud Atlas, 165 cloud processors and storage, 11–12, 19, 20, 42, 62, 88, 92, 100, 110, 113, 121, 124n, 144, 146n, 147, 149, 151, 153–54, 168, 203, 209, 245–46, 255, 258, 261–62, 274, 284, 292, 306, 311–13, 326, 338, 347–48, 350, 359 code, 112, 272 cognition, 111–12, 195–96, 260, 312–13, 314, 315, 328 Cold War, 189 Coleman, Ornette, 353 collectives, 358–60 collusion, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 Columbia Records, 161n commercial rights, 317–24, 347 commissions, 184 communications industry, 258 communism, 136, 153, 291, 344 compensatory servers, 64 competition, 42, 60, 81, 143–44, 147, 153, 180, 181, 187–88, 246–48, 326 complexity, 53–54 Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Nelson), 229 computer programmers, 113–14, 123, 286n computers: artificiality of, 130, 134 calculations by, 146n, 147–48, 149, 151 cloud processors and, see cloud processors and storage development of, 53, 129–30 as machines, 22–25, 123, 129–30, 155, 158, 165–66, 178, 191, 193, 195, 248, 257–58, 261, 328 memory of, 146n networks of, see digital networks parallel, 147–48, 149, 151 personal (PCs), 158, 182n, 214, 223, 229 programming of, 113–14, 120, 123, 157, 180, 193, 248, 272, 286n, 342, 362–63 remote, 11–12 reversible, 143n security of, 175, 345–46 servers for, 12n, 15, 31, 53–57, 71–72, 95–96, 143–44, 171, 180, 183, 206, 245, 358 software for, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 68, 86, 99, 100–101, 128, 129, 147, 154, 155, 165, 172–73, 177–78, 182, 192, 234, 236, 241–42, 258, 262, 273–74, 283, 331, 347, 357 user interface for, 362–63, 364 computer science, 113–14, 120, 123, 157, 180, 193, 248, 272, 286n, 342, 362–63 conflicts of interest, 62n Confucianism, 214, 215–16 connectivity, 171–72, 184–85, 273, 296n, 309, 316, 331 consciousness, 195–96 conservatism, 148, 149–51, 153, 204, 208, 249, 251, 253, 256, 293 construction industry, 151 consultants, 69–72 consumer electronics, 85–86, 162 consumer-facing sites, 179–80, 182, 216 consumers, see economies, consumer “content farms,” 120 contracts, 79–82, 172, 182, 183–84, 246–48, 314, 347, 352–53 copyright, 44, 47, 49, 60, 61, 96, 183, 206, 207, 224–26, 239–40, 263–64 corporations, 265–67, 307, 314, 348–51 correlations, 75–76, 114–15, 192, 274–75 correlative algorithms, 75–76 corruption, 31, 48, 77, 235, 257, 341n cost comparisons, 64 cost-effectiveness, 136–37 cost externalization, 59n countercultures, 24 Craigslist, 177n credit, 52, 116, 177, 193, 287–90, 305, 320, 337–38 credit cards, 185, 186, 269n credit ratings, 52, 116, 177, 193, 320 creepiness, 305–24 crime, 48, 307, 311, 319–21 crowdsourcing, 21, 86, 119–20, 356 cryptography, 14 currencies, 286–87 customer service, 177 cyberactivism, 14, 199, 200–201, 210, 308–9, 335–36, 339 cyberattacks, 201 cybernetics, 230 cyberpunk literature, 309, 356n Daedalus, 22 data, 12, 20, 50–54, 55, 71–76, 92, 167n, 174, 176–77, 178, 196, 223, 234–35, 246–48, 256–58, 271–75, 286–87, 292, 300, 307, 316, 317–24, 347 see also big data databases, 20, 71–72, 75–76, 178, 192, 203 data copying, 50–51 data mining, 120 dating services, 108–9, 113, 167–68, 274–75, 286 Deadpool, 189 death denial, 193, 218, 253, 263–64, 325–31, 367 death tolls, 134 debt, 29, 30n, 54, 92, 95, 96 Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber), 30n decision-making, 63–64, 184, 266, 269–75, 284n decision reduction, 266, 269–71, 284n deconstructionism, 131 democracy, 9, 32–33, 44, 90–92, 120, 200, 202–4, 207, 208, 209, 209, 210, 246–48, 277–78, 321, 324, 336, 342 Democratic Party, 202 demonetization, 172, 176n, 186, 207, 260–61 denial of service, 171–72, 312–13, 315 depopulation, 97, 133 depressions, economic, 69–70, 75, 135, 151–52, 288, 299 deprinters, 88 derivatives funds, 56, 60, 149, 153, 155, 301 determinism, 125, 143, 156, 166–68, 202, 328, 361 devaluation, 15–16, 19–21 developed world, 53–54 Diamond, Jared, 134 dice throws, 23n Dick, Philip K., 18, 137 differential pricing, 63–64 digital cameras, 2 digital networks, 2–3, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19–21, 31, 35, 49, 50–51, 53, 54–55, 56, 57, 59, 60–61, 66–67, 69–71, 74, 75, 77–80, 92, 96, 99, 107–8, 118–19, 120, 122, 129–30, 133n, 136–37, 143–48, 192, 199, 209, 221–30, 234, 235, 245–51, 259, 277, 278, 286–87, 308–9, 316, 337, 345, 349, 350, 355, 366–67 design of, 40–45 educational, 92–97 effects, 99, 153, 169–74, 179, 181–82, 183, 186, 207, 305, 362–63, 366 elite, 15, 31, 54–55, 60, 122, 201 graph-shaped, 214, 242–43 medical, 98–99 nodes of, 156, 227, 230, 241–43, 350 power of, 147–49, 167 punishing vs. rewarding, 169–74, 182, 183 tree-shaped, 241–42, 243, 246 see also Internet digital rights movement, 225–26 digital technology, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 18, 31, 40, 43, 50–51, 132, 208 dignity, 51–52, 73–74, 92, 209, 239, 253–64, 280, 319, 365–66 direct current (DC), 327 disease, 110 disenfranchisement, 15–16 dossiers, personal, 109, 318 dot-com bubble, 186, 301 double-blind tests, 112 Drexler, Eric, 162 DSM, 124n dualism, 194–95 Duncan, Isadora, 214 Dyson, George, 192 dystopias, 130, 137–38 earthquakes, 266 Eastern Religion, 211–17 eBay, 173, 176, 177n, 180, 241, 343 eBooks, 113, 246–47, 352–60 eBureau, 109 economic avatars, 283–85, 302, 337–38 economics, 1–3, 15, 22, 37, 38, 40–41, 42, 67, 122, 143, 148–52, 153, 155–56, 204, 208, 209, 236, 259, 274, 288, 298–99, 311, 362n, 363 economies: austerity in, 96, 115, 125, 151, 152, 204, 208 barter system for, 20, 57 collusion in, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 competition in, 42, 60, 81, 143–44, 147, 153, 180, 181, 187–88, 246–48, 326 consumer, 16–17, 43, 54, 56n, 62, 63–65, 72–74, 85–86, 98, 114, 117, 154, 162, 173–74, 177, 179–80, 182, 192, 193, 215, 216, 223, 227, 241, 246, 247, 248–64, 271–72, 273, 286–88, 293, 323, 347–48, 349, 355–56, 357, 358–60 depressions in, 69–70, 75, 135, 151–52, 288, 299 dignity in, 51–52, 73–74, 92, 209, 239, 253–64, 280, 319, 365–66 distributions in, 37–45 of education, 92–97 efficiency in, 39, 42–43, 53, 61, 66–67, 71–74, 88, 90, 97, 118, 123, 155, 176n, 187–88, 191, 236, 246, 310, 349 entrepreneurial, 14, 57, 79, 82, 100–106, 116, 117–20, 122, 128, 148–49, 166, 167, 183, 200, 234, 241–43, 248, 274, 326, 359 equilibrium in, 148–51 financial sector in, 7n, 29–31, 35, 38, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56–67, 69–70, 74–80, 82, 115, 116–20, 148n, 153–54, 155, 179–85, 200, 208, 218, 254, 257, 258, 277–78, 298, 299–300, 301, 336–37, 344–45, 348, 350 freedom and, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 global, 33n, 153–56, 173, 201, 214–15, 280 government oversight of, 44, 45–46, 49, 79–80, 96, 151–52, 158, 199, 205–6, 234–35, 240, 246, 248–51, 299–300, 307, 317, 341, 345–46, 350–51 growth in, 32, 43–45, 53–54, 119, 149–51, 236, 256–57, 270–71, 274–75, 291–94, 350 of health care, 98–99, 100, 153–54 historical analysis of, 29–31, 37–38, 69–70 humanistic, 194, 209, 233–351 361–367 of human labor, 85, 86, 87, 88, 99–100, 257–58, 292 identity in, 82, 283–90, 305, 306, 307, 315–16 inclusiveness of, 291–94 information, 1–3, 8–9, 15–17, 18, 19–20, 21, 35, 60–61, 92–97, 118, 185, 188, 201, 207, 209, 241–43, 245–46, 246–48, 256–58, 263, 283–87, 291–303, 331, 361–67 leadership in, 341–51 legal issues for, 49, 74–78 levees in, 43–45, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 52, 92, 94, 96, 98, 108, 171, 176n, 224–25, 239–43, 253–54, 263, 345 local advantages in, 64, 94–95, 143–44, 153–56, 173, 203, 280 market, 16–17, 20, 23–24, 33–34, 38, 39, 43–46, 47, 50–52, 66–67, 75, 108, 118–19, 126, 136, 143, 144–48, 151–52, 155, 156, 167, 202, 207, 221–22, 240, 246–48, 254–57, 261, 262–63, 266, 277–78, 288, 292–93, 297–300, 318, 324, 326, 329, 344, 354, 355–56; see also capitalism mathematical analysis of, 40–41 models of, 40–41, 148–52, 153, 155–56 monopolies in, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 morality and, 29–34, 35, 42, 50–52, 54, 71–74, 252–64 Nelsonian, 335, 349–50 neutrality in, 286–87 optimization of, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 outcomes in, 40–41, 144–45 political impact of, 21, 47–48, 96, 149–51, 155, 167, 295–96 pricing strategies in, 1–2, 43, 60–66, 72–74, 145, 147–48, 158, 169–74, 226, 261, 272–75, 289, 317–24, 331, 337–38 productivity of, 7, 56–57, 134–35 profit margins in, 59n, 71–72, 76–78, 94–95, 116, 177n, 178, 179, 207, 258, 274–75, 321–22 public perception of, 66n, 79–80, 149–50 recessions in, 31, 54, 60, 76–77, 79, 151–52, 167, 204, 311, 336–37 regulation of, 37–38, 44, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 56, 69–70, 77–78, 266n, 274, 299–300, 311, 321–22, 350–51 risk in, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 71–72, 85, 117, 118–19, 120, 156, 170–71, 179, 183–84, 188, 242, 277–81, 284, 337, 350 scams in, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 self-destructive, 60–61 social aspect of, 37–38, 40, 148–52, 153, 154–56 stimulus methods for, 151–52 sustainable, 235–37, 285–87 transformation of, 280–94, 341–51 trust as factor in, 32–34, 35, 42, 51–52 value in, 21, 33–35, 52, 61, 64–67, 73n, 108, 283–90, 299–300, 321–22, 364 variables in, 149–50 vendors in, 71–74 Edison, Thomas, 263, 327 editors, 92 education, 92–97, 98, 120, 150, 201 efficiency, 39, 42–43, 53, 61, 66–67, 71–74, 88, 90, 97, 118, 123, 155, 176n, 187–88, 191, 236, 246, 310, 349 Egypt, 95 eHarmony, 167–68 Einstein, Albert, 208n, 364 elderly, 97–100, 133, 269, 296n, 346 elections, 202–4, 249, 251 electricity, 131, 327 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 184 “elevator pitch,” 233, 342, 361 Eloi, 137 employment, 2, 7–8, 11, 22, 56–57, 60, 71–74, 79, 85–106, 117, 123, 135, 149, 151–52, 178, 201, 234, 257–58, 321–22, 331, 343 encryption, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 338 End of History, The (Fukuyama), 165 endoscopes, 11 end-use license agreements (EULAs), 79–82, 314 energy landscapes, 145–48, 152, 209, 336, 350 energy sector, 43, 55–56, 90, 144, 258, 301–3 Engelbart, Doug, 215 engineering, 113–14, 120, 123–24, 157, 180, 192, 193, 194, 217, 218, 248, 272, 286n, 326, 342, 362–63 Enlightenment, 35, 255 enneagrams, 124n, 215 Enron Corp., 49, 74–75 entertainment industry, 7, 66, 109, 120, 135, 136, 185–86, 258, 260 see also mass media entrepreneurship, 14, 57, 79, 82, 100–106, 116, 117–20, 122, 128, 148–49, 166, 167, 183, 200, 234, 241–43, 248, 274, 326, 359 entropy, 55–56, 143, 183–84 environmental issues, 32 equilibrium, 148–51 Erlich, Paul, 132 est, 214 Ethernet, 229 Etsy, 343 Europe, 45, 54, 77, 199 evolution, 131, 137–38, 144, 146–47 exclusion principle, 181, 202 Expedia, 65 experiments, scientific, 112 experts, 88, 94–95, 124, 133–34, 178, 325–31, 341, 342 externalization, 59n Facebook, 2, 8, 14, 20, 56–57, 93, 109, 154, 169, 171, 174, 180, 181, 188, 190–91, 200n, 204, 206, 207, 209, 210, 214, 215, 217, 227, 242–43, 246, 248, 249, 251, 270, 280, 286, 306, 309, 310, 313, 314, 317, 318, 322, 326, 329, 341, 343, 344, 346, 347–48, 366 facial recognition, 305n, 309–10 factories, 43, 85–86, 88, 135 famine, 17, 132 Fannie Mae, 69 fascism, 159–60 fashion, 89, 260 feedback, 112, 162, 169, 203, 298, 301–3, 363–64, 365 fees, service, 81, 82 feudalism, 79 Feynman, Richard, 94 file sharing, 50–52, 61, 74, 78, 88, 100, 223–30, 239–40, 253–64, 277, 317–24, 335, 349 “filter bubbles,” 225, 357 filters, 119–20, 200, 225, 356–57 financial crisis (2008), 76–77, 115, 148n financial services, 7n, 29–31, 35, 38, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56–67, 69–70, 74–80, 82, 115, 116–20, 148n, 153–54, 155, 179–85, 200, 208, 218, 254, 257, 258, 277–78, 298, 299–300, 301, 336–37, 344–45, 348, 350 firewalls, 305 first-class economic citizens, 246, 247, 248–51, 273, 286–87, 323, 349, 355–56 Flightfox, 64 fluctuations, 76–78 flu outbreaks, 110, 120 fMRI, 111–12 food supplies, 17, 123, 131 “Fool on the Hill, The,” 213 Ford, Henry, 43 Ford, Martin, 56n Forster, E.

., 75, 91, 266–67 New York Times, 109 Nobel Prize, 40, 118, 143n nodes, network, 156, 227, 230, 241–43, 350 “no free lunch” principle, 55–56, 59–60 nondeterministic music, 23n nonlinear solutions, 149–50 nonprofit share sites, 59n, 94–95 nostalgia, 129–32 NRO, 199–200 nuclear power, 133 nuclear weapons, 127, 296 nursing, 97–100, 123, 296n nursing homes, 97–100, 269 Obama, Barack, 79, 100 “Obamacare,” 100n obsolescence, 89, 95 oil resources, 43, 133 online stores, 171 Ono, Yoko, 212 ontologies, 124n, 196 open-source applications, 206, 207, 272, 310–11 optical illusions, 121 optimism, 32–35, 45, 130, 138–40, 218, 230n, 295 optimization, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 Oracle, 265 Orbitz, 63, 64, 65 organ donors, 190, 191 ouroboros, 154 outcomes, economic, 40–41, 144–45 outsourcing, 177–78, 185 Owens, Buck, 256 packet switching, 228–29 Palmer, Amanda, 186–87 Pandora, 192 panopticons, 308 papacy, 190 paper money, 34n parallel computers, 147–48, 149, 151 paranoia, 309 Parrish, Maxfield, 214 particle interactions, 196 party machines, 202 Pascal, Blaise, 132, 139 Pascal’s Wager, 139 passwords, 307, 309 “past-oriented money,” 29–31, 35, 284–85 patterns, information, 178, 183, 184, 188–89 Paul, Ron, 33n Pauli exclusion principle, 181, 202 PayPal, 60, 93, 326 peasants, 565 pensions, 95, 99 Perestroika (Kushner), 165 “perfect investments,” 59–67, 77–78 performances, musical, 47–48, 51, 186–87, 253 perpetual motion, 55 Persian Gulf, 86 personal computers (PCs), 158, 182n, 214, 223, 229 personal information systems, 110, 312–16, 317 Pfizer, 265 pharmaceuticals industry, 66–67, 100–106, 123, 136, 203 philanthropy, 117 photography, 53, 89n, 92, 94, 309–11, 318, 319, 321 photo-sharing services, 53 physical trades, 292 physicians, 66–67 physics, 88, 153n, 167n Picasso, Pablo, 108 Pinterest, 180–81, 183 Pirate Party, 49, 199, 206, 226, 253, 284, 318 placebos, 112 placement fees, 184 player pianos, 160–61 plutocracy, 48, 291–94, 355 police, 246, 310, 311, 319–21, 335 politics, 13–18, 21, 22–25, 47–48, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 149–51, 155, 167, 199–234, 295–96, 342 see also conservatism; liberalism; libertarianism Ponzi schemes, 48 Popper, Karl, 189n popular culture, 111–12, 130, 137–38, 139, 159 “populating the stack,” 273 population, 17, 34n, 86, 97–100, 123, 125, 132, 133, 269, 296n, 325–26, 346 poverty, 37–38, 42, 44, 53–54, 93–94, 137, 148, 167, 190, 194, 253, 256, 263, 290, 291–92 power, personal, 13–15, 53, 60, 62–63, 86, 114, 116, 120, 122, 158, 166, 172–73, 175, 190, 199, 204, 207, 208, 278–79, 290, 291, 302–3, 308–9, 314, 319, 326, 344, 360 Presley, Elvis, 211 Priceline, 65 pricing strategies, 1–2, 43, 60–66, 72–74, 145, 147–48, 158, 169–74, 226, 261, 272–75, 289, 317–24, 331, 337–38 printers, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 privacy, 1–2, 11, 13–15, 25, 50–51, 64, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 204, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–13, 314, 315–16, 317, 319–24 privacy rights, 13–15, 25, 204, 305, 312–13, 314, 315–16, 321–22 product design and development, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 236 productivity, 7, 56–57, 134–35 profit margins, 59n, 71–72, 76–78, 94–95, 116, 177n, 178, 179, 207, 258, 274–75, 321–22 progress, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 promotions, 62 property values, 52 proprietary hardware, 172 provenance, 245–46, 247, 338 pseudo-asceticism, 211–12 public libraries, 293 public roads, 79–80 publishers, 62n, 92, 182, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 punishing vs. rewarding network effects, 169–74, 182, 183 quants, 75–76 quantum field theory, 167n, 195 QuNeo, 117, 118, 119 Rabois, Keith, 185 “race to the bottom,” 178 radiant risk, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 Ragnarok, 30 railroads, 43, 172 Rand, Ayn, 167, 204 randomness, 143 rationality, 144 Reagan, Ronald, 149 real estate, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 193, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 298, 300, 301 reality, 55–56, 59–60, 124n, 127–28, 154–56, 161, 165–68, 194–95, 203–4, 216–17, 295–303, 364–65 see also Virtual Reality (VR) reason, 195–96 recessions, economic, 31, 54, 60, 76–77, 79, 151–52, 167, 204, 311, 336–37 record labels, 347 recycling, 88, 89 Reddit, 118n, 186, 254 reductionism, 184 regulation, economic, 37–38, 44, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 56, 69–70, 77–78, 266n, 274, 299–300, 311, 321–22, 350–51 relativity theory, 167n religion, 124–25, 126, 131, 139, 190, 193–95, 211–17, 293, 300n, 326 remote computers, 11–12 rents, 144 Republican Party, 79, 202 research and development, 40–45, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 215, 229–30, 236 retail sector, 69, 70–74, 95–96, 169–74, 272, 349–51, 355–56 retirement, 49, 150 revenue growth plans, 173n revenues, 149, 149, 150, 151, 173n, 225, 234–35, 242, 347–48 reversible computers, 143n revolutions, 199, 291, 331 rhythm, 159–62 Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Kiyosaki), 46 risk, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 71–72, 85, 117, 118–19, 120, 156, 170–71, 179, 183–84, 188, 242, 277–81, 284, 337, 350 externalization of, 59n, 117, 277–81 risk aversion, 188 risk pools, 277–81, 284 risk radiation, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 robo call centers, 177n robotic cars, 90–92 robotics, robots, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 Roman Empire, 24–25 root nodes, 241 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 129 Rousseau humor, 126, 129, 130–31 routers, 171–72 royalties, 47, 240, 254, 263–64, 323, 338 Rubin, Edgar, 121 rupture, 66–67 salaries, 10, 46–47, 50–54, 152, 178, 270–71, 287–88, 291–94, 338–39, 365 sampling, 71–72, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 San Francisco, University of, 190 satellites, 110 savings, 49, 72–74 scalable solutions, 47 scams, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 scanned books, 192, 193 SceneTap, 108n Schmidt, Eric, 305n, 352 Schwartz, Peter, 214 science fiction, 18, 126–27, 136, 137–38, 139, 193, 230n, 309, 356n search engines, 51, 60, 70, 81, 120, 191, 267, 289, 293 Second Life, 270, 343 Secret, The (Byrne), 216 securitization, 76–78, 99, 289n security, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 self-actualization, 211–17 self-driving vehicles, 90–92, 98, 311, 343, 367 servants, 22 servers, 12n, 15, 31, 53–57, 71–72, 95–96, 143–44, 171, 180, 183, 206, 245, 358 see also Siren Servers “Sexy Sadie,” 213 Shakur, Tupac, 329 Shelley, Mary, 327 Short History of Progress, A (Wright), 132 “shrinking markets,” 66–67 shuttles, 22, 23n, 24 signal-processing algorithms, 76–78, 148 silicon chips, 10, 86–87 Silicon Valley, 12, 13, 14, 21, 34n, 56, 59, 60, 66–67, 70, 71, 75–76, 80, 93, 96–97, 100, 102, 108n, 125n, 132, 136, 154, 157, 162, 170, 179–89, 192, 193, 200, 207, 210, 211–18, 228, 230, 233, 258, 275n, 294, 299–300, 325–31, 345, 349, 352, 354–58 singularity, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 Singularity University, 193, 325, 327–28 Sirenic Age, 66n, 354 Siren Servers, 53–57, 59, 61–64, 65, 66n, 69–78, 82, 91–99, 114–19, 143–48, 154–56, 166–89, 191, 200, 201, 203, 210n, 216, 235, 246–50, 258, 259, 269, 271, 272, 280, 285, 289, 293–94, 298, 301, 302–3, 307–10, 314–23, 326, 336–51, 354, 365, 366 Siri, 95 skilled labor, 99–100 Skout, 280n Skype, 95, 129 slavery, 22, 23, 33n Sleeper, 130 small businesses, 173 smartphones, 34n, 39, 162, 172, 192, 269n, 273 Smith, Adam, 121, 126 Smolin, Lee, 148n social contract, 20, 49, 247, 284, 288, 335, 336 social engineering, 112–13, 190–91 socialism, 14, 128, 254, 257, 341n social mobility, 66, 97, 292–94 social networks, 18, 51, 56, 60, 70, 81, 89, 107–9, 113, 114, 129, 167–68, 172–73, 179, 180, 190, 199, 200–201, 202, 204, 227, 241, 242–43, 259, 267, 269n, 274–75, 280n, 286, 307–8, 317, 336, 337, 343, 349, 358, 365–66 see also Facebook social safety nets, 10, 44, 54, 202, 251, 293 Social Security, 251, 345 software, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 68, 86, 99, 100–101, 128, 129, 147, 154, 155, 165, 172–73, 177–78, 182, 192, 234, 236, 241–42, 258, 262, 273–74, 283, 331, 347, 357 software-mediated technology, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 South Korea, 133 Soviet Union, 70 “space elevator pitch,” 233, 342, 361 space travel, 233, 266 Spain, 159–60 spam, 178, 275n spending levels, 287–88 spirituality, 126, 211–17, 325–31, 364 spreadsheet programs, 230 “spy data tax,” 234–35 Square, 185 Stalin, Joseph, 125n Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 215 Stanford University, 60, 75, 90, 95, 97, 101, 102, 103, 162, 325 Starr, Ringo, 256 Star Trek, 138, 139, 230n startup companies, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 starvation, 123 Star Wars, 137 star (winner-take-all) system, 38–43, 50, 54–55, 204, 243, 256–57, 263, 329–30 statistics, 11, 20, 71–72, 75–78, 90–91, 93, 110n, 114–15, 186, 192 “stickiness,” 170, 171 stimulus, economic, 151–52 stoplights, 90 Strangelove humor, 127 student debt, 92, 95 “Study 27,” 160 “Study 36,” 160 Sumer, 29 supergoop, 85–89 supernatural phenomena, 55, 124–25, 127, 132, 192, 194–95, 300 supply chain, 70–72, 174, 187 Supreme Court, U.S., 104–5 surgery, 11–13, 17, 18, 98, 157–58, 363 surveillance, 1–2, 11, 14, 50–51, 64, 71–72, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–11, 315, 316, 317, 319–24 Surviving Progress, 132 sustainable economies, 235–37, 285–87 Sutherland, Ivan, 221 swarms, 99, 109 synthesizers, 160 synthetic biology, 162 tablets, 85, 86, 87, 88, 113, 162, 229 Tahrir Square, 95 Tamagotchis, 98 target ads, 170 taxation, 44, 45, 49, 52, 60, 74–75, 77, 82, 149, 149, 150, 151, 202, 210, 234–35, 263, 273, 289–90 taxis, 44, 91–92, 239, 240, 266–67, 269, 273, 311 Teamsters, 91 TechCrunch, 189 tech fixes, 295–96 technical schools, 96–97 technologists (“techies”), 9–10, 15–16, 45, 47–48, 66–67, 88, 122, 124, 131–32, 134, 139–40, 157–62, 165–66, 178, 193–94, 295–98, 307, 309, 325–31, 341, 342, 356n technology: author’s experience in, 47–48, 62n, 69–72, 93–94, 114, 130, 131–32, 153, 158–62, 178, 206–7, 228, 265, 266–67, 309–10, 325, 328, 343, 352–53, 362n, 364, 365n, 366 bio-, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 chaos and, 165–66, 273n, 331 collusion in, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 complexity of, 53–54 costs of, 8, 18, 72–74, 87n, 136–37, 170–71, 176–77, 184–85 creepiness of, 305–24 cultural impact of, 8–9, 21, 23–25, 53, 130, 135–40 development and emergence of, 7–18, 21, 53–54, 60–61, 66–67, 85–86, 87, 97–98, 129–38, 157–58, 182, 188–90, 193–96, 217 digital, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 18, 31, 40, 43, 50–51, 132, 208 economic impact of, 1–3, 15–18, 29–30, 37, 40, 53–54, 60–66, 71–74, 79–110, 124, 134–37, 161, 162, 169–77, 181–82, 183, 184–85, 218, 254, 277–78, 298, 335–39, 341–51, 357–58 educational, 92–97 efficiency of, 90, 118, 191 employment in, 56–57, 60, 71–74, 79, 123, 135, 178 engineering for, 113–14, 123–24, 192, 194, 217, 218, 326 essential vs. worthless, 11–12 failure of, 188–89 fear of (technophobia), 129–32, 134–38 freedom as issue in, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 government influence in, 158, 199, 205–6, 234–35, 240, 246, 248–51, 307, 317, 341, 345–46, 350–51 human agency and, 8–21, 50–52, 85, 88, 91, 124–40, 144, 165–66, 175–78, 191–92, 193, 217, 253–64, 274–75, 283–85, 305–6, 328, 341–51, 358–60, 361, 362, 365–67 ideas for, 123, 124, 158, 188–89, 225, 245–46, 286–87, 299, 358–60 industrial, 49, 83, 85–89, 123, 132, 154, 343 information, 7, 32–35, 49, 66n, 71–72, 109, 110, 116, 120, 125n, 126, 135, 136, 254, 312–16, 317 investment in, 66, 181, 183, 184, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 limitations of, 157–62, 196, 222 monopolies for, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 morality and, 50–51, 72, 73–74, 188, 194–95, 262, 335–36 motivation and, 7–18, 85–86, 97–98, 216 nano-, 11, 12, 17, 162 new vs. old, 20–21 obsolescence of, 89, 97 political impact of, 13–18, 22–25, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 199–234, 295–96, 342 progress in, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 resources for, 55–56, 157–58 rupture as concept in, 66–67 scams in, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 singularity of, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 social impact of, 9–21, 124–40, 167n, 187, 280–81, 310–11 software-mediated, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 startup companies in, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 utopian, 13–18, 21, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 see also specific technologies technophobia, 129–32, 134–38 television, 86, 185–86, 191, 216, 267 temperature, 56, 145 Ten Commandments, 300n Terminator, The, 137 terrorism, 133, 200 Tesla, Nikola, 327 Texas, 203 text, 162, 352–60 textile industry, 22, 23n, 24, 135 theocracy, 194–95 Theocracy humor, 124–25 thermodynamics, 88, 143n Thiel, Peter, 60, 93, 326 thought experiments, 55, 139 thought schemas, 13 3D printers, 7, 85–89, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 Thrun, Sebastian, 94 Tibet, 214 Time Machine, The (Wells), 127, 137, 261, 331 topology, network, 241–43, 246 touchscreens, 86 tourism, 79 Toyota Prius, 302 tracking services, 109, 120–21, 122 trade, 29 traffic, 90–92, 314 “tragedy of the commons,” 66n Transformers, 98 translation services, 19–20, 182, 191, 195, 261, 262, 284, 338 transparency, 63–66, 74–78, 118, 176, 190–91, 205–6, 278, 291, 306–9, 316, 336 transportation, 79–80, 87, 90–92, 123, 258 travel agents, 64 Travelocity, 65 travel sites, 63, 64, 65, 181, 279–80 tree-shaped networks, 241–42, 243, 246 tribal dramas, 126 trickle-down effect, 148–49, 204 triumphalism, 128, 157–62 tropes (humors), 124–40, 157, 170, 230 trust, 32–34, 35, 42, 51–52 Turing, Alan, 127–28, 134 Turing’s humor, 127–28, 191–94 Turing Test, 330 Twitter, 128, 173n, 180, 182, 188, 199, 200n, 201, 204, 245, 258, 259, 349, 365n 2001: A Space Odyssey, 137 two-way links, 1–2, 227, 245, 289 underemployment, 257–58 unemployment, 7–8, 22, 79, 85–106, 117, 151–52, 234, 257–58, 321–22, 331, 343 “unintentional manipulation,” 144 United States, 25, 45, 54, 79–80, 86, 138, 199–204 universities, 92–97 upper class, 45, 48 used car market, 118–19 user interface, 362–63, 364 utopianism, 13–18, 21, 30, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 value, economic, 21, 33–35, 52, 61, 64–67, 73n, 108, 283–90, 299–300, 321–22, 364 value, information, 1–3, 15–16, 20, 210, 235–43, 257–58, 259, 261–63, 271–75, 321–24, 358–60 Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles (VALS), 215 variables, 149–50 vendors, 71–74 venture capital, 66, 181, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 videos, 60, 100, 162, 185–86, 204, 223, 225, 226, 239, 240, 242, 245, 277, 287, 329, 335–36, 349, 354, 356 Vietnam War, 353n vinyl records, 89 viral videos, 185–86 Virtual Reality (VR), 12, 47–48, 127, 129, 132, 158, 162, 214, 283–85, 312–13, 314, 315, 325, 343, 356, 362n viruses, 132–33 visibility, 184, 185–86, 234, 355 visual cognition, 111–12 VitaBop, 100–106, 284n vitamins, 100–106 Voice, The, 185–86 “voodoo economics,” 149 voting, 122, 202–4, 249 Wachowski, Lana, 165 Wall Street, 49, 70, 76–77, 181, 184, 234, 317, 331, 350 Wal-Mart, 69, 70–74, 89, 174, 187, 201 Warhol, Andy, 108 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 137 water supplies, 17, 18 Watts, Alan, 211–12 Wave, 189 wealth: aggregate or concentration of, 9, 42–43, 53, 60, 61, 74–75, 96, 97, 108, 115, 148, 157–58, 166, 175, 201, 202, 208, 234, 278–79, 298, 305, 335, 355, 360 creation of, 32, 33–34, 46–47, 50–51, 57, 62–63, 79, 92, 96, 120, 148–49, 210, 241–43, 270–75, 291–94, 338–39, 349 inequalities and redistribution of, 20, 37–45, 65–66, 92, 97, 144, 254, 256–57, 274–75, 286–87, 290–94, 298, 299–300 see also income levels weather forecasting, 110, 120, 150 weaving, 22, 23n, 24 webcams, 99, 245 websites, 80, 170, 200, 201, 343 Wells, H.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

Still, it was strange, and when David and I visited the call center, we could see at once that it was the same one used for Eldon Insurance. As I later testified to the UK parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in its “Disinformation and ‘fake news’” inquiry, sixty people or so manned the phones, at about five rows of desks, making outgoing calls to customers in what I was told was the Eldon database to ask questions about Brexit where they usually would be answering questions from their insurance customers. The manager of the call center was a young woman who looked to be about my age.

It was difficult, in fact, to tell the difference between the Leave.EU campaign crew and the insurance office workers as I passed by them on the way to the boardroom. There were about ten people in all, each in charge of a different department: press and PR, social media, canvassing, events, and running the call center. Mostly pale and plainly dressed, they were seated stolidly in their chairs, their ID lanyards around their necks, looking rather unenthusiastic—until they started listening to David and me speak. Once they understood what we were there to do, they were grateful that we had come. They told us they felt like “fish out of water.”


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Emboldened by the Jet Age, companies broke themselves into pieces and spread them around searching for comparative advantage. Given enough telephones, flights, and mainframes, they could put their headquarters in one place, their factories in another, their R & D labs in a third, their back-office file cabinets in a fourth, and their call centers in a fifth. Once they added FedEx to the equation and swapped out their mainframes for PCs, factories left for Mexico (then China), call centers for India, and R & D for Beijing. The puzzle keeps rearranging itself, and the pieces keep moving farther away. The next thing to go is the notion of having a headquarters, and the idea that a global enterprise can and should be run by one person from one place.

If an airline wanted to fly to Chicago, it needed permission from the government; if you wanted to, you called your travel agent, because the Internet was then still just a science experiment. Twenty years later, by now a professor at North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, Kasarda had seen enough of NAFTA to know that factories were headed overseas, and call centers, branch offices, and even headquarters would soon follow. They would all need to link up again somehow, and faster than before. “The Global Air Cargo–Industrial Complexes” was his first stab at explaining it in 1991, imagining factories lining the runways someday. FedEx saw these schematics and called seeking his help—it was grappling with something called e-commerce.

They were building an aerotropolis, all right, but they hadn’t yet figured out what to do with it. GMR’s real business is infrastructure—aerotropoli are only its latest offering. It builds power plants—natural gas, coal, hydro—paves roads, and opens airports. It is “getting India ready,” according to its tag line. Ready, that is, to steamroll whatever bits of the world its call center operators and office tigers haven’t already flattened. India grew at a torrid 9 percent annually for most of the past decade, a pace it can’t possibly regain and sustain without much, much more of what GMR is selling—the bones and sinews of modern commerce. The company’s namesake and founder is a proud, self-made patriarch who made his first fortune selling burlap, one G.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

JAMES MANYIKA: Yes, that’s a great example of where the labor-supplied limiting portion was really “the Knowledge” of all the streets and shortcuts in the minds of the London taxi drivers. When you devalue that skill because of GPS systems, what’s left over is just the driving, and many more people can drive and get you from A to B. Another example here, in an old form of deskilling, is to think about call center operators. It used to be that your call center person actually had to know what they were talking about often at a technical level in order to be helpful to you. Today, however, organizations embedded that knowledge into the script that they read. What’s left over for the most part is just someone who can read a script.

I grew up in the Middle East during the time of the first Gulf War, so I’ve realized that there are so many problems in the world that need to be solved. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to a machine that’s just going to wake up someday and be able to solve all these problems. So, to answer your question, I’m not concerned. MARTIN FORD: If you think about a relatively routine job, for example a customer service job in a call center, it does sound like the technology you’re creating might enable machines to do that more human element of the work as well. When I’m asked about this, which is often, I say the jobs that are most likely to be safe are the more human-oriented jobs, the ones that involve emotional intelligence. But it sounds like you’re pushing the technology into this area as well, so it does seem that there’s a very broad range of occupations that could be eventually be impacted, including some areas currently perceived as quite safe from automation.

They don’t really need to know the technical details, at least not as much as before; they just need to be able to follow and read the script, unless they get to a real corner case, where they can escalate to a deep expert. There are many examples of service work and service technician work, whether it’s through the call center, or even people physically showing up to done on-site repairs, where some portions of that work are going through this massive deskilling—because the knowledge is embedded in either technology, or scripts, or some other way to encapsulate the knowledge required to solve the problem. In the end, what’s left over is something much more deskilled.


pages: 284 words: 72,406

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, Jj Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, business cycle, call centre, clean water, death of newspapers, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, pets.com, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, work culture

Instead, most corporations set up an environment where people are more involved in politics than in making a profit. At Zappos if you don’t fit with the team, and the culture, you don’t fit in the company. Their annualized attrition rate is 12 percent, and most of the turnover, they say, is in their call center. That’s because they fire people who aren’t passionate about delivering for customers. Zappos sees those people as the public face of the company, and its standards are high. Folks at Zappos are flexible on a lot of things, but not on that. I’ve seen this same dynamic play out on teams. One person on a team might have specialized knowledge or skills—knowledge they hoard like misers.

Ashram College assholes, 5.1, 5.2, 7.1 Association for Computing Machinery AT&T ATMs (Automatic Teller Machines) autonomy, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 7.1 avionics Backlog, 2.1, 4.1, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, app.1 priorities and, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 and product vision Bailar, John bandwagon effect, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Bangladesh banks, financial crisis and, 9.1, 9.2 barriers Barton, Brent, 6.1, 6.2 Baxter robot Bell, Steve Bell Labs, 2.1, 4.1 BellSouth Ben-Shahar, Tal, 7.1, 7.2 Big Picture Bikhchandani, Sushil blame, in teams, 3.1, 3.2 BMW Booz Allen Hamilton, Katzenbach Center at Borland Software Corporation Boston, Mass., 1.1, 3.1, 3.2 Boston Celtics Bowens, Maneka Boyd, John, 8.1, 8.2 brain mapping, multitasking and Brooks, Fred Brooks, Rodney, 2.1, 9.1 Brooks’s Law Brown, Rachel bureaucracy, 9.1, 9.2 Burndown Chart, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, app.1 cabals Cairo call center, Zappos cell phones, 5.1, 9.1 driving and, 5.1, 5.2 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3.1, 6.1 Challenger disaster, 3.1, 3.2 Change Control Boards, 8.1, 9.1 Change for Free change orders Change or Die Chicago Tribune, churches, Scrum at Cohn, Mike Cold War collaboration, 7.1, 7.2 Colorado, Sunshine laws in Colorado, University of, Medical School communication saturation, 4.1, 4.2, 8.1 Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs) complacency, dangers of complex adaptive systems, 2.1, 2.2 Cone of Uncertainty, 119 “Constant Error in Psychological Ratings, A” (Thorndike) context switching, loss to continuous improvement Happiness Metric and happy bubbles and, 7.1 contracts Change for Free in government Coomer, Greg Copenhagen Coplien, Jim Coram, Robert corporate culture change in cost overruns Cowan, Nelson cross-functionality, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 7.1, 8.1 Crozier, William customer-responsive models customers: external vs. internal wants of cynicism Daily Stand-Ups (Daily Scrum), 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, app.1 Dalkey, Norman D-day DeAngelo, Michael Decide, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 185 decision loop decision making Product Owner and self-control and Declaration of Independence Delivering Happiness (Hsieh), Delphi method, 6.1, 6.2 Deming, W.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

.* Infant mortality has fallen by almost two-thirds from one in ten live births in 1985 to thirty-seven per thousand today.1 Though poverty is still endemic and India retains the capacity to shock, the trappings of modern life are everywhere: cars, motorbikes, flyovers, mobile phones, supermarkets, tall buildings, call centers, pace, energy. For all its litany of indignities and daily injustices, India feels like a country that, as one author puts it, is “becoming”—though quite what it is becoming is yet to become clear.2 It is important to state something unequivocally. Growth—and by that I mean even raw growth as measured imperfectly by GDP—has the power to transform poor people’s lives.

In 2017 South Koreans are more than eight times wealthier than their Ghanaian counterparts for one reason: the miracle of compound growth.3 This book has argued that growth is not all it is cracked up to be—often it does not mean what you think it means. But if you are poor, economic growth can be transformative. Fast growth can alleviate poverty both by generating jobs—digging roads, constructing office blocks, or manning call centers—and by providing the government with tax revenue that it can use to redistribute wealth and build the physical and institutional infrastructure needed for more and better growth.4 Of course it can create other problems, pulling people from the countryside into urban slums or clogging up the roads with diesel-spewing vehicles.


pages: 267 words: 71,941

How to Predict the Unpredictable by William Poundstone

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, Brownian motion, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, centre right, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Thorp, Firefox, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index card, index fund, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, market bubble, money market fund, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, transaction costs

Here’s a grim thought for the next time you’re waiting to speak to a customer service representative. Whether you’re put on hold is sometimes determined by a prediction of how profitable a customer you are. The jargon is ARPU, for “average revenue per user.” To Big Data, we’re all slabs of consumer meat. The call center’s software uses caller ID, just as some psychic hotlines do. In case you’ve never tried it, Googling a phone number usually returns a name and address. Another search or two, and you’ve got plenty. Boiler-room psychics play out this information to convince the gullible of their powers. Big Data has other methods.

It knows whether the person is calling from a mobile phone or landline and has the mailing address of the account. Neustar is able to rate customer profitability instantly. Its software can predict the odds that a credit card applicant will qualify. When the chance is high, the customer gets to speak to a human being immediately. Presumed deadbeats are shunted to an overflow call center far, far away. The next time you have trouble getting through to a business, you might want to hang up and call back using an Internet phone service like Google Voice. This time the software will see your Internet phone number, not your regular one. That won’t always work in your favor, but sometimes it will.


Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success by Greg Nudelman, Pabini Gabriel-Petit

access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, call centre, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, folksonomy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, search costs, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social graph, social web, speech recognition, text mining, the long tail, the map is not the territory, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Freeman Evans broke down what constitutes online consumer research. For example, 60% read customer reviews and 42% checked in-store availability before going to the store to buy. Multichannel no longer means just online and brick-and-mortar stores. Even Web-only stores need to consider mobile and call-center use. And increasingly, people are accessing the Web from new channels such as their gaming console and connected TV. Each channel brings its own expectations to search. If you were to do more multichannel, search-behavior ethnographies like this, you would eventually find a pattern: People use multiple search features, across multiple modes of discovery.

Some search features that support discovery include the following: faceted search—which shows people results having particular attributes and lets them browse and refine the results user-review search—which lets people read the frank feedback of other consumers and possibly exposes the attributes of the reviewers through faceted search buying guide, product-info sheet, or demo video search—which incorporate features of document search like text mining and advanced relevancy to show supplemental information alongside results from the product catalog Context of the Channel People’s expectations of search features vary according to the context of the channel. For example, they expect mobile to be location-aware, and in-store kiosks to be inventory aware. On the Web, they expect pages to be optimized for a big screen; on mobile devices, for a small one. And they also expect a store to know which channel they’ve used. For example, a call center should have different return information for an online shopper than for someone who shopped at a brick-and-mortar store. Although the multichannel search experience is already common, it is not yet a well-designed experience. It’s a kluge. People face unnecessary gaps across channels, often because the channels aren’t aware of each other.


pages: 265 words: 74,000

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Berlin Wall, Black Swan, business process, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, full employment, illegal immigration, index card, information security, Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, McMansion, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, off-the-grid, PageRank, personalized medicine, recommendation engine, RFID, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, workplace surveillance

If so, the models would eventually include this detail, among countless others. Takriti's job is to depict flesh-and-blood humans as math. Takriti is not given to bold forecasts. But if his system is successful, here's how it will work: Picture an IBM manager who gets an assignment to send a team of five to set up a call center in Manila. She sits down at the computer and fills out a form. It's almost like booking a vacation online. She puts in the dates and clicks on menus to describe the job and the skills needed. Perhaps she stipulates the ideal budget range. The results come back, recommending a particular team. All the skills are represented.

Maybe the computer will come to conclusions about the individual's circle of friends or be able to predict his or her behavior. For now, though, with only a tiny sliver of a second to devote to each blog post, Umbria is delivering far simpler fare. It's looking to see if the writers have opinions about services or products—a new cell phone, for example, or the call center for a large bank. The only conclusion it reaches is whether the blogger has a favorable or unfavorable opinion. Thumbs up, thumbs down. It sounds crude. What makes the blog world especially valuable to marketers, though, is not its precision but its unfiltered immediacy. Opinions change day by day, sometimes hour by hour.


The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number (Bloomberg) by Liam Vaughan, Gavin Finch

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy low sell high, call centre, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, low interest rates, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, urban sprawl

The BBA’s members were the same banks that sat on the Libor panels, banks whose annual subscriptions paid the BBA staff ’s wages. There was also what could generously be called a skills gap. The BBA’s Libor manager, John Ewan, was in his early thirties and had no banking experience. Prior to joining the association in 2005, he had spent time working in a call center before packing it in and traveling the world for 18 months. Tall and gawky with bulging eyes and prominent sideburns, Ewan frequently wore a startled expression. Behind his back, bosses fretted about whether he was up to the job.2 During meetings he would sit quietly and take notes. He lacked the experience to stand up in a room full of veteran bankers and challenge their behavior.

They included requiring banks to get their processes for setting Libor approved by external auditors, adding new banks to the Libor panels, culling some of the more obscure maturities such as four months and seven months, and basing the published rate on a random selection of bank submissions rather than using those of each bank on every panel. If those modest proposals had been adopted, many of the problems that followed might have been prevented. In the end, two of the most powerful men in the global economy weren’t making the decisions. Libor’s destiny rested in the hands of 15 unnamed, middle-ranking bankers and a former call-center worker in London. Despite its pervasiveness, the benchmark resided in a kind of regulatory wasteland. There were no references to it in any of the 56 THE FIX myriad laws and regulations governing financial markets and no readily enforceable rules on how the rate should be set by individual traders or their employers.


pages: 270 words: 75,626

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn

A Pattern Language, c2.com, call centre, continuous integration, do well by doing good, Great Leap Forward, index card, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, phenotype, tacit knowledge, web application

Too many commercial products take the approach that it’s possible to guess what users want. If you have the chance to observe users work with your software, take it. This chance for rapid and direct feedback from users is one of many reasons to release software as early and often as possible. At one company the users were nurses working in a call center. The nurses answered medical questions from callers. The nurses indicated that they needed a large text field that could be used for documenting the results of the call when the call was finished. An initial version of the software included a large text field on the call wrapup screen. However, after the initial release each member of the development team spent a day observing the users.

The Users’ Manager When doing development on a project for internal use, the organization may be reluctant to give you full and unlimited access to one or more users but may be willing to give you access to the users’ manager. Consider this a bait-and-switch unless the manager is also a true user of the software. Even then, it is almost certain that the manager has different usage patterns of the software than does a typical user. For example, on one call center application the team was initially given access to shift supervisors. While shift supervisors did use the software, many of the features they wanted in a new version were focused around managing call queues and transferring calls between agents. These features were of very minimal importance to the users they supervised, for whom the software was mostly intended.


pages: 600 words: 72,502

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Other proxies get surrogated as well. The standard models also hold that having excess labor on the job is inefficient. Another proxy for efficiency is the elimination of slack. Exactly how many workers need to be, for example, on the retail floor to serve the expected number of customers? Exactly how many minutes should a call-center operator spend on each customer call? Anything more than the minimum is slack and hence the embodiment of inefficiency. Therefore, companies have been using ever more sophisticated algorithms to schedule workers as tightly as possible, leaving no slack for employees to serve their customers better.

Ton’s work clearly demonstrates that a model embracing optimal rather than minimal slack does in fact work in retail. She shows that a combination of higher pay, more training (particularly cross-training), greater slack, and limited assortment is the combination that produces extraordinary results in retailing—and has been applied beyond in nursing homes and call centers. It is clearly doable, and her Good Jobs Institute is helping other retailers to adopt this successful approach—which sees slack as a variable in a complex adaptive system to be balanced rather than as an error to be eliminated. Manufacturing experts recognize the importance of slack when dealing with the most complex machines, for example the giant industrial paper machines used in making high-volume grades such as photocopier paper or toilet tissue.


pages: 314 words: 75,678

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

agricultural Revolution, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, fear of failure, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of air conditioning, Louis Pasteur, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, oil shock, performance metric, plant based meat, purchasing power parity, risk tolerance, social distancing, Solyndra, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, the High Line, urban planning, yield management

I thought about our foundation’s motto—“Everyone deserves the chance to live a healthy and productive life”—and how it’s hard to stay healthy if your local medical clinic can’t keep vaccines cold because the refrigerators don’t work. It’s hard to be productive if you don’t have lights to read by. And it’s impossible to build an economy where everyone has job opportunities if you don’t have massive amounts of reliable, affordable electricity for offices, factories, and call centers. Melinda and I often meet children like nine-year-old Ovulube Chinachi, who lives in Lagos, Nigeria, and does his homework by candlelight. Around the same time, the late scientist David MacKay, a professor at Cambridge University, shared a graph with me that showed the relationship between income and energy use—a country’s per capita income and the amount of electricity used by its people.

Small-scale solar can be an option for people in poor, rural areas who need to charge their cell phones and run lights at night. But that kind of solution is never going to deliver the massive amounts of cheap, always-available electricity these countries need to jump-start their economies. They’re looking to do what China did: grow their economies by attracting industries like manufacturing and call centers—the types of businesses that demand far more (and far more reliable) power than small-scale renewables can provide today. If these countries opt for coal plants, as China and every rich country did, it’ll be a disaster for the climate. But right now, that’s their most economical option. * * * — It’s not immediately obvious why there’s such a thing as a Green Premium in the first place.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

When she became CEO in 2011, she realized a combination of pervasive low interest rates and technological change was going to drive huge disruption for her company and her employees. “I said to myself, I don’t want to be one of those companies that has to turn all these people out on the streets.”19 Mulligan made several practical moves. She started a program to teach people in the company’s call centers to write code, joined a program to teach actuaries to be data analysts, and developed a program of “train in, train out,” which provided two years’ tuition at a local community college for workers whose jobs were eliminated. “Companies have an obligation to society to try and do this,” she said.

He described how he saw that firsthand with his own workers. He prides PayPal on paying at or above market rates across the globe. Yet when they did a study of the net disposable income of their employees—what they had left after essential living expenses and taxes—he found that their entry level call center workers had disposable incomes below 10 percent. “And we feel that 20 percent is the bare minimum you need for somebody to have savings, to be able to not struggle to make ends meet at the end of the month. We were paying at or above market rates. So clearly, the market isn’t working for a segment of our population.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

The reason is not only India’s role as a global software hub but the large number of newly unemployed in the call center sector, with which India has become synonymous. Machine learning has caught up to Bangalore’s chatty call center workers, automating customer service, data analysis, and other tasks. The IT industry remains India’s largest employer—with 4 million workers and $150 billion in annual revenues in 2017—but net new annual hiring has plummeted from a peak of 400,000 toward zero. Top IT companies such as Infosys and Tech Mahindra will have layoffs of nearly 500,000 by 2020. Filipino back-office workers face the same risk to their call center jobs. Start-ups are absorbing some of the displaced while luring those who don’t want to work in corporate behemoths.


pages: 567 words: 122,311

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

Four Reasons to Use the One Metric That Matters The OMTM is of most importance early on. Later, as your startup scales, you will want to focus on more metrics, and you’ll have the resources and experience to do so. Importantly, you’ll also have a team to whom you can delegate metrics. Your operations person might care about uptime or latency, your call center might worry about average time on hold, and so on. At Year One Labs, one of the litmus tests for us as advisors and investors was the clarity with which a team understood, and tracked, their OMTM. If it was on the tip of their tongues, and aligned with their current stage, that was a good thing.

In many B2B-focused companies, the top 20% of customers generate 150–300% of profits, while the middle 70% of customers break even, and the lowest 10% of customers reduce 50–200% of profits.[146] You’ll track support metrics like top-requested features, number of outstanding trouble tickets, post-sales support, call center hold time, and so on. This will indicate where you’re losing money, and whether the product is standardized and stable enough to move into growth and scaling. Segment this data, too. Figure out who’s costing the most money. Then consider firing them.[147] Once, it was hard to break out individual customer costs, but electronic systems make it possible to assign activities—such as support calls, emails, additional storage, or a truck roll—to individual customers.

Scale stage considerations, The Hole in the Middle stages and, Model + Stage Drives the Metric You Track buy-in, executive, Beforehand: Get Buy-in, Get Executive Buy-in buyer and seller growth rate, What DuProprio Watches buyer and seller ratings, What DuProprio Watches, Conversion Rates and Segmentation C CAC (customer acquisition cost) Backify case study, Backupify’s Customer Lifecycle Learning determining normal value for metrics, Socialight Discovers the Underlying Metrics of Pricing in e-commerce model, A Practical Example, Abandonment in mobile apps model, Model Three: Free Mobile App, Mobile Download Size in Revenue stage, Stage Four: Revenue, Where Does the Money Come From?, Breakeven on Variable Costs in SaaS model, Model Two: Software as a Service (SaaS) paid engine and, Virality Engine Caddell, Bud, Deciding What to Do with Your Life, The Lean Canvas CakeMail mailing platform, Mailing List Effectiveness call center hold time metric, Support Costs call to action, Mailing List Click-Through Rates campaign contribution metric, Mailing List Click-Through Rates Campbell, Patrick on setting pricing, Pricing Metrics, Socialight Discovers the Underlying Metrics of Pricing, Socialight Discovers the Underlying Metrics of Pricing on upselling, Upselling and Growing Revenue cancellation rate, Am I Good Enough?


pages: 431 words: 132,416

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos

Alan Greenspan, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, financial engineering, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index card, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, offshore financial centre, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, your tax dollars at work

Chapter 5 The Goddess of Justice Wears a Blindfold If I needed a reminder of how potentially dangerous an investigation of the financial industry can be to a whistleblower, I got it in February 2003. An honest man named Peter Scannell was working in Putnam Investments’ Quincy, Massachusetts, call center, basically taking customer buy and sell orders. Eventually he realized that some of his customers were market-timing; at the end of the trading day, if the American stock market had gone up they bought mutual funds loaded with foreign stocks, figuring those stocks would rise when trading began in the foreign markets the next day.

A Ponzi scheme is actually one of the easiest fraud schemes to detect because there is no underlying investment product and no trading, while the assets are being diverted to pay offinvestors. Yet this case was assigned to SEC staffers who had absolutely no experience and little knowledge of Ponzi schemes, and they really had no place within the SEC to go to learn about them. To further increase the SEC’s auditing effectiveness, I would create a Center for All Lessons Learned, a CALL center, similar to a database that has been used with great effectiveness for decades by the U.S. Army. CALL would collate and sort through every fraud uncovered by the SEC. These frauds would be analyzed to find both the common and the unique elements so that the odds of future similar frauds being undetected would be greatly reduced.

Pension fund regulation should be moved from the Department of Labor to the SEC. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission should be brought into the SEC, which would then become the sole capital markets regulator. To ensure the highest degree of coordination, this super-agency would maintain a centralized database, a super-duper CALL center so that the details of any enforcement action by one agency would be online for all the other agencies to see and utilize. Spread the knowledge, share the experience, be bigger than the biggest bad guys. Bernie Madoff got caught for the first time in 1992, but apparently none of the investigators after the turn of the century knew about it.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

An NBC sitcom, Outsourced, has sought to frame the issue of outsourcing humorously by depicting a supposedly all-American company, Mid-American Novelties, that sells products such as whoopee cushions, foam hands with extended fingers (like those used at sporting events), and plastic molds that look like pools of fake blood. The Mid-American Novelties call center, where customers place orders, has been outsourced to India. When the company sends a manager, Todd Dempsy (Ben Rappaport), from the United States to run the call center, he quickly learns that he must educate his new staff in the ways of American culture so that they can more effectively interact with U.S. callers and make sales. To accomplish this goal, Dempsy requires employees in India to watch old films so that they can learn U.S. popular culture.

They must study English, lose their accents, and pretend to live in the United States when talking with callers. This humorous framing downplays the crisis that outsourcing has created for many U.S. workers and their families. It also minimizes the problems faced by people who increasingly must rely on globalized call centers for technology support and to purchase products and services. In media framing of stories about job loss in the United States, illegal immigration is a key culprit, along with downsizing and outsourcing. Articles and news reports about the “Americano Dream” explain how indigenous workers are pitted against illegal immigrants, sometimes referred to more politely as undocumented workers, who are a source of cheap labor in this country.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

His nasally vowels gave many the mistaken impression he was a native Chicagoan. O’Sullivan dreamed of being a writer, and started freelancing political pieces for Gawker, Jacobin, and other left-leaning outlets. To pay the bills, he landed in a call center at a tech company, a lower-level peon answering angry customer support questions. The work was depressing, but he spent his off-hours pursuing his passion, hustling for opportunities to write. More vivid than his dreary call center job was O’Sullivan’s digital life on Twitter. He mostly used it to follow political accounts and news and to connect with other writers. He started chatting with other leftists and joking around with people who began as anonymous avatars in his Twitter feed, then slowly grew to become his online friends.

The contract-based labor model that eschewed directly employing drivers. The campaigns against drivers who wanted to unionize. To him, this faceless, monolithic tech company would never defend its Muslim cab drivers. O’Sullivan couldn’t pinpoint whether it was his deep, familial ties to organized labor, the frustration he felt towards his shitty call center tech job, or the deep-seated need to fight back against Trump. He just snapped: he had had it with Uber. Sitting alone in his cold apartment in the dead of a Chicago winter, he started typing a response to Uber’s tweet, still fuming with anger. “congrats to @Uber_NYC on breaking a strike to profit off of refugees being consigned to Hell,” @Bro_Pair tweeted, “eat shit and die.”


pages: 512 words: 131,112

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

The addition of sidewalks and pervious public green space figured into both Meyer, Scherer, and Rockcastle’s elegant transformation of a grocery store into a public library in Texas, and The Beck Group’s award-winning conversion of a Super Kmart into a megachurch in Georgia. Many other vacant big-box stores have been converted to call centers and office space—including the headquarters for Hormel Foods, which includes the Spam Museum in a former Kmart in Minnesota. There are countless additional examples of this kind of recycling that show welcome but minor improvements to the physical and social infrastructure. 5 However, retrofitting’s greater potential goes well beyond incremental adaptive reuse or renovation.

Empty big boxes have facilitated the same kind of diversification of activities and enrichment of social opportunities along suburban strips. They have been adaptively reused as churches/synagogues/ mosques, libraries, courthouses, government offices, community centers, school and university buildings, nightclubs, dinner theaters, multiplex cinemas, gymnasiums, an indoor go-cart raceway, the Spam Museum, call centers, offices, and medical clinics (one example in Savannah reused the heavy voltage from the frozen food section of a former grocery store to power an MRI scanner).31 The addition of these programs to suburban areas lacking in third places enriches their neighborhoods and adds opportunities for greater communal interaction—even without further changes to the physical context.

It also offers an opportunity to reclaim park and open space that may have been lost to commercial development in previous generations and to mitigate the environmental damage, especially to the local watershed, that the paved-over conditions of malls produced. Examples of changing the use at mall sites to create needed local jobs in lower middle-class and blue-collar suburbs are Eastgate in Chattanooga, Tennessee; NetCenter in Hampton Roads, Virginia; and NetPark in Tampa, Florida. The big floor plates of department stores are ideal for a call center business. Adaptive reuse of these buildings usually involves adding windows and/or skylights to existing vacated department stores to bring in natural light. In some instances, the internal concourses of the mall remain intact but are unused. In other examples, such as Downtown Park Forest and Willingboro Town Center, the local municipality has been forced to step in and assume ownership of the dead mall site in order to forestall the spread of blight.


pages: 430 words: 135,418

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

He set about crafting a facility that he dubbed not a store but a gallery. He’d staff it like Tesla’s other stores, include the same educational materials, but no pricing would be allowed on the premises. If somebody was interested in buying a car, they’d be directed to a computer where they’d enter their contact info. A call center in Colorado would follow up. The law dictated that their vehicle couldn’t physically be located in the state prior to the sale—but that wasn’t a problem for Tesla, as there wasn’t exactly a ton of inventory lying around. Customers who ordered vehicles generally had to wait for them to be made. Only after a Texas customer’s check had arrived at Tesla could the vehicle enter the state.

Though Musk was chairman and the largest single investor of both Tesla and SolarCity, the two companies’ cultures had diverged greatly. The basic means of selling their products were miles apart, for instance. Musk despised hard sales practices, which had contributed to Tesla’s stores acting more like education centers. SolarCity was all about the hard sell, with salesmen traveling door-to-door and using call centers to pressure potential customers. The sales force was highly incentivized for such practices, too. Tesla disliked the idea of having its salespeople working against each other, shying away from the commissions that SolarCity embraced. The differences showed in the books. Wheeler’s team calculated that SolarCity had spent $175 million in commission payments in the previous twelve months, compared to just $40 million at Tesla.

Back then, the Model S represented a challenging sell to buyers uncertain about an upstart carmaker offering an untested technology. After the success of the Model S, however, those concerns weren’t as prominent for the Model 3. Those buyers still needed some handholding, though, especially when it came to financing and trading in current vehicles. Kim worked to beef up call centers, where in-house sales teams would take the lead in closing deals. Tesla wasn’t going to make the mistake it had made with the Roadster and the Model S, assuming reservations would automatically convert into sales. Cayle Hunter had been hired in January 2018 to oversee the new in-house sales and delivery team based in Las Vegas, in an old SolarCity office not far from the Strip.* Other, smaller teams were based in Fremont and New York.


pages: 77 words: 18,414

How to Kick Ass on Wall Street by Andy Kessler

Andy Kessler, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, buttonwood tree, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, eat what you kill, family office, fixed income, hiring and firing, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, London Whale, low interest rates, margin call, NetJets, Nick Leeson, pets.com, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk

But the other reason compensation is many, many multiples of the average wage in this country is that trading stocks, doing IPOs, merging companies, managing money is a very lucrative business. Not everyone can do it. It looks easy, football field-sized trading rooms jammed with adrenalin rush maniacs like you sitting in front of huge stacks of LCD screens. It might as well be a call center in Mumbai. But it’s hard. Really nasty hard. Wall Street hires in that top one percentile zone – as in intelligence. And then they make your life miserable hoping you’ll quit before they break you. Or hoping they break you before you lose money for the firm. It’s not WalMart or General Motors or even Pfizer or Intel.


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

On the new network you could call any toll-free number, not just AT&T hosted numbers, and there would be no ANI on the call, unless you were calling 800-CALL-ATT or a few other numbers that are internal numbers hosted by the call center itself. All you have to do to cause ANI-fails to toll-free numbers now is dial 10-10-288-0 and touch tone in the 800 number when AT&T comes on the line. This method of causing ANI-fails is great because you don’t have to speak to a live operator and you can even have your modem wardial 800 numbers without fear of your ANI being logged. 94192c16.qxd 6/3/08 3:35 PM Page 667 A New Era of Telephony However there are some AT&T call centers that still forward ANI, and you may be able to reach them even if the call centers aren’t in your area. Try op diverting to an AT&T language assistance operator.

The number is never good from out of state, but most of my “colleagues” in the call center don’t know this and give it out, causing much frustration when the caller calls back to complain and get a good number. It’s a toll-free number and clearly marked “out-of-state,” but most callers don’t want the “Toll-Free Number Runaround.” They want a “direct number,” then get the recording that the number in the 780 exchange is not valid. So how does a Telco go about changing the listings in the directory database that I (and my 600 friends in my call center) use every day? Do what we tell people who call wondering why their number isn’t in our directory: “Call your Local Phone Company, and make sure they have your listing correct.

Portable programmable road signs are often mounted on wheels atop a small trailer (complete with gasoline generator and a dedicated PC or proprietary controller or cellular modem) and towed to road construction sites as needed. Surprisingly, the metal cabinet containing the programming electronics is seldom (or insecurely) locked. Large LED array signs are often used on factory floors to display production run data to assembly-line workers, or in call centers to indicate call volume, ANI data, or other information to operators. These units are usually hardwired via RS-232 interface to a company computer. If you come across a programmable sign (say, at a garage sale but there is no manual or programming device with it) get the manufacturer’s name off the unit and contact them for an operations and programming manual for that model.


pages: 72 words: 21,361

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

In particular, over the past 25 years, physical activities that require a degree of physical coordination and sensory perception have proven more resistant to automation than basic information processing, a phenomenon known as Moravec’s Paradox’. For instance, many types of clerical work have been automated, and millions of people interact with robot bank tellers and airport ticket agents each day. More recently, call center work—which was widely offshored to India, the Philippines, or other low-wage nations in the 1990s—has increasingly been replaced by automated voice response systems that can recognize an increasingly large domain-specific vocabulary and even complete sentences. In contrast, vision, fine motor skills, and locomotion have been much harder to automate.


pages: 360 words: 85,321

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling by Adam Kucharski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, call centre, Chance favours the prepared mind, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, diversification, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flash crash, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, locking in a profit, Louis Pasteur, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, p-value, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

When the national cricket team plays arch rival Pakistan, the total amount wagered can approach $3 billion. Yet the Asian betting market is changing. Gamblers no longer need to track down black market bookmakers in rooms behind backstreet bars. There was a time when they would need to bring cash and a code word; now they can bet by phone or online. Glossy call centers have replaced grimy betting rooms. The new industry is a step away from the illegal black market, but it remains little regulated. This is the “gray market”: modern, corporate, and opaque. When it comes to high-stakes betting on sports such as soccer, Asia is the location of choice for many Western gamblers.

See robots (bots) backgammon, 172–173 Baldwin, Roger, 36–37, 38 bankroll management, 65–67, 144–145 bankruptcy, 66 bans on bank transfers, 198 by casinos, 22, 40, 43 by poker websites, 192–193, 195 in sports, 90 baseball, 79–80, 87, 88, 106, 200, 209 basketball, 82, 85–86, 107 Bass, Thomas, 14 Bayern, Shawn, 181 Beane, Billy, 209 Beasley-Murray, Ben, 20 Beat the Dealer (Thorp), 35, 39, 61, 208 beauty contests, Keynes’ interpretation of, 122–123, 124 behavior accounting for, 208 deeper understanding of, developing, 217 influence of, in poker, 191–192 involved in lying, 190–191 of opponents and the need for predictions, 163 robots copying, 192 social, influence of, 203 tit-for-tat, 161 unanticipated, errant algorithms and, 118 unpredictability of, 3, 133, 134 Benter, Bill, 35, 39, 42, 43, 45–46, 52, 55, 56–57, 67–68, 79, 91, 103, 206, 207, 211, 218 Bertsimas, Dimitris, 214 Betfair, 93–94, 95, 97, 111, 112, 113, 114–115, 116–117 betting exchanges, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99, 110, 111, 112–113, 114–115, 132, 217 betting limits, 22, 140 See also limited-stakes poker betting syndicates in horse racing, 35, 52–53, 54, 56, 57–58, 64, 66–69, 103, 206 legalization of, 101 lotteries and, 30, 31–32, 33–34, 202 private, traditional preserve of, 96 in sports, 89, 100, 102, 103, 110 betting window, 112 bias favorite-long-shot, 45, 46, 57 in models, 211 overlays, 56 physical, 7, 8, 21 psychological, 6, 98 billiards, 19 Billings, Darse, 167 Binion’s Gambling Hall, 139–140 Black, Andrew, 93–94 black market bookmakers, 90–91 blackjack bankroll management in, 65, 144 card counting in, 35, 38, 41, 71, 152, 180, 202, 207, 208, 211, 213, 214 complexity and, 83–84 computerized prediction in, 42 evolution of methods in, 208 idea for an optimal strategy in, 36–37 loopholes found in, 72, 197 and the Monte Carlo method, 61 online, 71–73 randomness in, 38, 40, 41, 42, 71, 212 university course studying, 213–214 bluffing, 138, 139, 142, 143, 147, 177, 190, 208, 217 body language, 162–163 Bolton, Ruth, 46, 49–52, 54, 55, 68, 69, 211, 216, 218 bonus abuse, 72 bonuses, 71, 72 bookmakers aims of, 88–89 arbitrage and, 110, 111 betting limits and, 91 black market, 90–91 competition faced by, 93, 94 and information flow, 89, 90 and legalization of gambling, 101 online gambling and, 73 predictions and, 73, 75, 77, 81, 87–88, 89 robots as, 130 and slippage, 114 sports and, 90–92, 93, 95, 101, 110, 111 traditional, 43, 93, 111 Borel, Émile, 40, 41, 62, 63, 148, 156, 211–212 Boston Globe (newspaper), 32 bot hunters, 193 Bowling, Michael, 187 brains adult, 177–178 artificial, 173–174, 175 child, 172, 178 injured parts of, related to regret, 153 memory and, 180 Bringing Down the House (Mezrich), 214 brute force approach, 33–34, 64, 168, 171 bucketing, 152, 180 Bundesliga, 78 Burch, Neil, 181, 188 butterfly effect, 9, 124 cable, 110, 113 California State Lottery, 141 call centers, 90 Cantey, Wilbert, 37 Cantor Fitzgerald, 87 Cantor Gaming, 87–88, 89 card counting, 35, 38, 41, 71, 152, 180, 202, 207, 208, 211, 213, 214 card shuffling, 40–42, 62, 215 Carnegie Library, 80 Cash WinFall, 29–32 casino industry, 212 casinos bans by, 22, 40, 43 gaming machines at, rules involving, 177 security at, 2, 20, 21, 22, 40, 73, 197, 213 See also blackjack; poker; roulette causation and correlation, issue of, 206–207 Centaur, 100 Cepheus poker bot, 188 Chadwick, Henry, 80 Champions League, 93 Chaos (journal), 15 chaos theory, 9, 13, 22, 120, 124, 127, 217 chaotic decision making, 162 Chapin, R.


pages: 307 words: 17,123

Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry by Marc Benioff, Carlye Adler

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, business continuity plan, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, digital divide, iterative process, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, Nicholas Carr, platform as a service, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business

As much as we had wished to win enterprise companies in the past, and even made some lackluster efforts to do so, we did not have the distribution or distribution capacity in place to make this a sustainable pursuit. Building distribution is a tremendous challenge: it’s expensive, it’s time-consuming, and it’s always evolving (especially as geographic targets change). The first step was to expand beyond our call center in San Francisco and place sales reps in the field. We needed individuals who were experts in the various markets and professionals with a proven track record. Although the corporate sales team did a fantastic job on the phone, they weren’t the right group to build enterprise sales. They had just graduated from college, had no experience selling face-to-face, and wore T-shirts and jeans to work.

The threatening letter demanded we cease operating under the salesforce name. This was a gigantic problem. Trademark infringement is a notoriously sticky subject in Australia—and one that can cost companies huge sums of money. Additionally, SalesForce Australia was an intimidating company to have as an adversary. It had been in the market running outsourced call centers since 1994 and had established a name for itself by working with such huge customers as Hewlett-Packard and BMW. In an effort to prepare for the worst outcome—having to enter the market under a different name—we trademarked the name sforce. I did not, however, want to have to use the alternate name.


pages: 444 words: 84,486

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, G4S, high net worth, information asymmetry, Kim Stanley Robinson, license plate recognition, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, old-boy network, public intellectual, satellite internet, six sigma, Social Justice Warrior, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit

“Too much screen-time, Daddy,” Maddy said, a perfect impression of her mother, made all the more uncanny by their increasing resemblance and a recent matching mommy-daughter haircut with blue highlights. He picked up Maddy and gave her a hard squeeze while she squealed and kicked and laughed. “OK, kiddo,” he said, and caught Lacey’s eye. Lacey looked worried. Joe had the school run that morning. Lacey had gone back to work, landing a job at a call center that handled reservation problems for a big hotel chain, and Joe had shifted his hours around so that he could do the drop-off in the morning and Lacey could do the pickup at night. It wasn’t a good career move—there was a direct correlation between being at your desk at 8:00 a.m. and getting a promotion—but since the day of Lacey’s diagnosis, all his passion for a career had leaked out of him and been replaced by an equally urgent sense that his time with his family was a fleeting thing to be savored.

The cops had served no-knock warrants on all four, gone in with guns drawn and SWAT backup—but had somehow managed to fail to shoot any of them in the process. Joe took some comfort in that. Social media exploded with the personal lives of these four guys, who were, to put it mildly, basic as fuck. They had bullshit jobs: jobs that no one, not even them, thought worth doing. One was a management consultant. One was a customer service manager for a call center. One was an ad-tech programmer. One was a marketing specialist for cryptocurrency startups. All shared one trait: they’d watched the slow death of an insured loved one who’d been denied coverage. In an earlier age, they’d have stewed in private misery, become alcoholics, shot themselves. Instead, they’d followed simple online instructions for starting a message board and hosting it on a bulletproof server accessible only via the Tor network.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

The two party headquarters—the DNC and the RNC—are just a couple blocks away from the Capitol and feature large rooms filled with tables and telephones. Party leaders encourage lawmakers to spend hours at these telephones, calling through lists of potential donors. Representative Peter Defazio, a Democrat from Oregon, described the situation: “If you walked in there, you would say, ‘Boy, this is about the worst looking, most abusive looking call center situation I’ve seen in my life. … These people don’t have any workspace, the other person is virtually touching them.”13 Politicians eye the plush K Street lobbying career (or the career as lobbyists in state capitals) that beckons at the end of a successful stint as an elected official. In his 2012 book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It, the Harvard professor Larry Lessig tells the story of the Mississippi senator John Stennis.

“If you want to sell stuff made in China, you no longer have to have representatives on the ground in that country, nor do you have to place orders for a certain, guaranteed volume of goods. All you have to do is click on a site like Alibaba.com.” As Wessel points out, other companies now exist that provide twenty-four-hour call centers and state-of-the-art business management software to small organizations. “The competitive advantages of scale are being commoditized. Minimum efficient scale is getting smaller and smaller.10 The impact of the collapse of scale will change—in fact, already is changing—our economy and our companies in ways we do not yet understand.


pages: 279 words: 87,910

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

What is called “skilling” is too often a euphemism for rendering mechanical what once demanded at least a degree of knowledge, alertness and involvement. The skills of the craftsman, the mechanic, the builder, the butcher, the baker have decayed; a great deal of work, reduced to the purely routine, remains literally stupefying. The work routines of modern supermarkets and call centers have been dubbed “digital Taylorism,” in homage to the inventor of the conveyor belt.16 Drastic cost reductions have reduced “face time,” as sociability is now called. The “creativity” of many jobs is just branding: “hard-working passionate chefs creating every day” runs an advertisement for a well-known fast-food chain.

., “ ‘No Place to Hide’: The Reality of Leadership in UK Supermarkets,” SKOPE Research Paper 91, on the McDonald’s-ization of work. On digital Taylorism, see Philip Brown et al., The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs and Incomes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 65–82. For the grisly world of call centers, see Simon Head, The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 100–16. 17. St Paul’s Institute, Value and Values: Perceptions of Ethics in the City Today (London: St Paul’s Institute, 2011). 18. H. Bielenski, G. Bosch and A. Wagner, Employment and Working Time in Europe (Dublin: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions [EFILWC], 2002).


pages: 403 words: 87,035

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

We’ll walk the streets of Seattle’s up-and-coming Pioneer Square, once known for its methadone clinics and now home to companies such as Zynga and Blue Nile. We will visit Berlin, Europe’s sexiest city but still surprisingly poor, and Raleigh-Durham, which is relatively dull but increasingly prosperous. We will discover why Walmart.com had to leave Arkansas and what this means for auto workers in Flint and call-center employees in Albuquerque. In doing so, we will discover how the changes in the world economy are reshaping the American workplace and American communities. These are the forces that will determine the location of future jobs and the fate of particular cities and regions. We will learn what causes these changes and how they will affect our careers, our communities, and our way of life.

Wages in China have been creeping up, a predictable effect of increased prosperity. China’s move to revalue its currency, the yuan, has further increased labor costs from the perspective of American companies. General Electric has reopened an appliances factory in Kentucky after years overseas. Carbonite has brought a call center back to Boston from India. After twelve years in Mexico, Otis Elevators is moving its production from Nogales back to South Carolina. There are even signs of “insourcing,” the opposite of outsourcing, in which foreign companies invest in production facilities in the United States. A Chinese company called Yuncheng has opened a factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, finding it cheaper than Shanghai.


pages: 277 words: 85,191

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Asian financial crisis, call centre, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, family office, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, high-speed rail, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, pirate software, plutocrats, race to the bottom, rolodex, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South China Sea, special economic zone, walking around money, WikiLeaks

While it took months—and often a bribe—to get a landline telephone from a lumbering state-owned phone company, paging technology, sold by private firms, allowed people to leapfrog ahead. Scores of paging firms opened up vast call centers, firing messages nationwide. By the late 1990s, close to 100 million Chinese had pagers. Then another disruptive technology—mobile telephones—arrived with messaging capabilities built in, and paging began to lose out. Lan’s firm, PalmInfo, attempted to give these call centers a new lease on life, offering secretarial and banking services. ChinaVest was interested in PalmInfo and we ultimately helped Lan raise $4 million. In late 1999, Lan offered me a job, spurring another big change in my life.


pages: 92 words: 23,741

Lessons From Private Equity Any Company Can Use by Orit Gadiesh, Hugh MacArthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, call centre, corporate governance, financial engineering, inventory management, job-hopping, long term incentive plan, performance metric, shareholder value, stock buybacks, telemarketer

For the second initiative, the new owners assigned a high-level executive team—supported by outside technical experts—to spearhead a change management program to consolidate loan processing, credit collection, and trade finance into two new customer service centers. This initiative included a parallel step that dedicated project teams to upgrade Korea First’s IT organization, adding telemarketing and customer call-center capacities. By choreographing these steps in parallel, Newbridge was able to make Korea First’s new facilities operational within five months. Finally, the blueprint took into account the need to build the right organization with the right salespeople to support the full-potential plan. As in many Asian business cultures, Korea’s labor and management have a loyalty compact supported by strong employment laws.


pages: 514 words: 152,903

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

Had they done that and come up with loan-modification scenarios that were reasonable and put people into more affordable payments early on, we wouldn’t be where we are now.” A spokesman for Goldman Sachs said the company disagreed with Wyatt’s account but offered no specifics. At Bank of America, by far the country’s largest servicer, an employee who works in one of the bank’s many call centers finds the process as mystifying as do the borrowers to whom he speaks every day. The employee says homeowners have been regularly routed to him after being rejected from HAMP for unclear reasons. Sometimes it’s news to them they’d been denied at all. He says he’s learned not to put any stock in those previous denials—the income information in Bank of America’s system entered by some other employee in another department is often incorrect.

The representative said we should save those payments because we would use them for a new down payment when we were approved for the modification. So we did exactly as we were told. But, once we were assigned to a modification caseworker, we could never get her on the phone. Ever. It took six months for first contact. Then, we were served foreclosure papers. I begged and pleaded and frantically reminded the call center representatives every day that we had only done what we were told. I advised [them] we had saved all of the payments and had six months’ worth of payments in the bank that I would hand over now. They said they could not accept payments on a property in foreclosure. We hired an attorney and they eventually offered to modify the loan after a couple of years of fighting it, but we would also owe $8,000 in their attorney’s fees.

There is a segment of the population”—like the consumers of her company’s higher-end product, she felt—“that cares and will pay for it.” If they are aware how inhumane the reality is. But awareness has a long way to go, and logistics doesn’t just mean online retail; food packagers and processors, medical suppliers, and factories use mega-3PLs as well. And a whole lot of other industries—hotels, call centers—take advantage of the price controls and plausible deniability that temporary staffing offers. “Maybe awareness will lead to better working conditions,” says Vinod Singhal, a professor of operations management at Georgia Tech. “But …” Given the state of the economy, he isn’t optimistic. This is the kind of resignation many of my coworkers have been forced to accept.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

March 23, 2014. wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303369904579423402132106512-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMjExNDIyWj. 40 PhoneID Score: Kashmir Hill. “Your Phone Number Is Going to Get a Reputation Score.” Forbes. Nov. 11, 2013. forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/13/your-phone-number-is-going-to-be-scored. 40 $214 million industry: Natasha Singer. “In a Mood? Call Center Agents Can Tell.” New York Times. Oct. 12, 2013. nytimes.com/2013/10/13/business/in-a-mood-call-center-agents-can-tell.html. 40 Beyond Verbal background: Beyond Verbal. “App Developers.” beyondverbal.com/join-us/app-developers. 41 “measure psychological traits”: Michal Kosinski, David Stilwell, and Thor Graepel. “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior.”

Both Twitter and the AP were criticized for their lax security, and a few months later, Twitter introduced two-factor authentication, a security measure that should make such incidents less likely in the future. The financial industry didn’t escape scrutiny either, as some commentators, already chastened by the 2010 crash, began to consider the consequences of automated, high-frequency trading. The next frontier in sentiment analysis may be not in what we write but in what we say. Some call centers and customer-service lines are investing in computational voice analysis, allowing them to detect the moods of callers. The pitfalls of this practice are obvious—the software may not be accurate, customers may be sorted into categories in which they don’t want to be, people’s moods can change from call to call or even within a single call—but it gives companies more control over how they manage incoming calls.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

DATA SOURCE: OECD online database on “Trade in Value Added” (known as TiVA), www.oecd.org. The final category is India. India’s value-added export growth has been remarkably biased toward services, although the manufacturing sector accounts for about 40 percent of its growth. This reflects the country’s well-known prowess in information technology services, call centers, and the like. Brazil and Indonesia defy simple classification. Their booming value-added exports were generated about 40 percent from the primary sector and 40 or 50 percent from the manufacturing sector. For comparison, the bottom panel of Figure 28 shows the same decomposition for the G7.

When the ICT got good enough, the patient and surgeon could be in different countries. The first instance came in 2001 when a New York surgeon operated on a patient in Strasbourg. It is not yet routine, but as telecommunications gets better and more reliable, remote surgery could become as routine as remote call centers are today. If this happened, the best French surgeons would become very busy; anyone with a torn meniscus would want it repaired by one of the world’s leading experts, some of whom are in France. The mediocre knee surgeons would have to find something else to do. But the individuality of the New Globalization’s impact is not limited to highly skilled workers.


pages: 298 words: 89,287

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, call centre, David Brooks, equal pay for equal work, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, feminist movement, financial independence, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, Steven Levy, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey

Thanks to Facebook, email and Skype, we have never communicated more with more people in more places. As consumers, we have never had more in common. In India, call-center workers learn to flatten their vowels, take Western names and learn the plotlines of American sitcoms to make customers in a continent they have never visited feel more at home. On the other hand, however, we have become fearful of the outside world and do everything we can to establish and enhance our “difference.” The period when Indian call centers were taking off coincided with the rise of Hindu fundamentalism as a potent and lethal political force. “I am afraid that the celebrated cultural identities are being erased by modernization, by Americanization, by television, by a whole process of making modes of life uniform,” writes Pierre Hassner in La Violence et la paix.


pages: 323 words: 92,135

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

And we still got pitched new ideas from entrepreneurs looking for venture funding. But it was sometime in 2001 that I started noticing a difference to these pitches. They weren’t coming from Stanford MBAs or three guys in Sunnyvale with a brilliant idea. I got pitched by a group visiting from Bangalore to expand call centers for U.S. companies. Or from another group in Bombay doing contract software development work for hire. A group of Israeli physicists had a new way of creating transistors that could change the entire semiconductor business. There were some software coders in Norway working on applications for cell phones.

The idea of living on Singapore Airlines 747s or United Airlines 777s doesn’t float my boat. The answer is simple—I’m not sure. There is no way to be sure. Most of these places still seem stuck in that industrial mode— making stuff for us. But the more I look, the more I see these pockets of innovation: a group writing code for Symbian cell phones in Norway, architecting call centers in Bombay, designing a chip for Chinese set-top boxes in Guangzhou, rethinking the physics of nanoscale electronics in Tel Aviv. They may not amount to much, but I damn sure need to understand them before I invest in any technology, in Silicon Valley or anywhere else. George Soros and Julian Robertson of Tiger had it easy.


pages: 263 words: 89,368

925 Ideas to Help You Save Money, Get Out of Debt and Retire a Millionaire So You Can Leave Your Mark on the World by Devin D. Thorpe

asset allocation, buy and hold, call centre, diversification, estate planning, fixed income, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, junk bonds, knowledge economy, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, payday loans, random walk, risk tolerance, Skype, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

If you no longer have a network to approach, you can start by listing your services on Odesk.com, a web site for freelancers to ply their trade. Note than much of the competition is international from low wage countries so this is not likely to be a source for the best paying gigs, but it may be a way to get you started right now. Call center jobs: visit monster.com, the giant job board, and search for “work from home call center” and you’ll see a list of available jobs. If you search just “work from home” you’ll see many more jobs. Research any work from home employer carefully. Do not pay fees to get a job. No legitimate employer will require you to pay the company! Network marketing: many people love network marketing and make a good living at it.


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Securities analysis (high-skill) can be delivered remotely; so can keyboard entry (low-skill), radiology (high-skill), and customer complaint centers. Governments have become enthusiastic exporters of service jobs, though in the United States it’s typically done through private-sector subcontractors. In Albert Brooks’s 2006 film Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, Brooks is seen repeatedly walking past a call center in Delhi, allowing us to hear a sequence of increasingly outlandish salutations capped finally by “This is the White House. How may I direct your call?” A 2006 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that much administration of state government programs had been shifted offshore, including—in what seemed like a cruel joke—the processing of unemployment insurance claims.22 “Twenty or thirty years from now,” Blinder mused, “will Economics 101 lectures at Princeton University be delivered by a life-like hologram of a well-educated and well-spoken professor who is actually in Mumbai, but who can see and hear the Princeton students via video and audio hookups—and who earns one-fifth of what I do?”

But something close to the dystopia they envision where effort and skill don’t matter already exists for those toiling in the economy’s lower tiers. They should have a chat with their office receptionist. Or they could read Nickel and Dimed, or the 2010 book Catching Out, by Dick J. Reavis, a contributing editor at Texas Monthly, who went undercover as a day laborer. Waitresses, nonunion construction workers, dental assistants, call-center operators—people in these jobs are essentially replaceable, and usually have bosses who don’t distinguish between individual initiative and insubordination. Even experience is of limited value, because it’s often accompanied by diminishing physical vigor. A little further up the income scale, median income has declined during the past decade while productivity has increased.


pages: 279 words: 87,875

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

My only option if I wanted to take the job at the Journal was to rent out the house until the market improved. * * * Determined to lower the payments, I drove to the bank where I had taken out the mortgage five years earlier and asked for the banker who had made my loan. I was told he no longer worked there and was handed a 1-800 number. I spoke to one call-center worker after another, on hold for hours, restarting the conversation with each transfer or disconnection. The bank required a comical amount of faxed correspondence. I spent a lot of time in line at the Office Depot service desk to send documents that I was pretty sure no one would actually ever receive.

The appraisal hit the mark, no termites turned up, and closing was scheduled for May. Everything was going smoothly until I called Regions Bank to request the precise amounts needed to pay off my loans. The bank wouldn’t tell me. I was directed to a toll-free line where I was bounced around a call center like a basketball that had rolled through a puddle of muck. It was as if the lender had never dealt with someone selling their house. Eventually someone told me that I had to make the request in writing, via fax, and could expect an answer to be mailed to me a week or two later. That was preposterous.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

Basically, it reads their communications and makes automated suggestions about how they can improve as individuals and how the company can better manage all its employees overall. Cogito, another such company, is a sort of real-time coach for call-center agents. Its software analyzes phone conversations with customers and looks for signs of frustration, hurried speech, even “intent to buy.” As the call-center agent progresses, he might be given an “empathy cue” if the software thinks the conversation needs a bit of warmth. According to the company’s sales materials, not only can agents use the technology to “speak more confidently, concisely, and compassionately,” but the technology also looks for the common characteristics of the highest-performing agents, and “provides automated guidance to help all agents perform like the best.”


pages: 89 words: 27,057

COVID-19: Everything You Need to Know About the Corona Virus and the Race for the Vaccine by Michael Mosley

Boris Johnson, call centre, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, lockdown, microbiome, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, social distancing

Within a week four other members of his family had also tested positive for Covid-19, as did five other people who had been in the restaurant at the same time and who had been seated at tables B and C. The restaurant was well ventilated, with an air conditioner and an extractor fan. No one seated at tables E or F seems to have become infected, perhaps because they were out of the main airflow. In another fascinating study, this time at a busy call center, South Korean researchers showed how a single, asymptomatic employee was able to infect nearly 100 others.22 The investigation started when someone working in a 19-story office building came down with Covid-19. The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) sprang into action. They closed the building down and sent in a team to test everyone who worked in the building, or who had visited.


pages: 618 words: 159,672

Fodor's Rome: With the Best City Walks and Scenic Day Trips by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

call centre, Donald Trump, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, low cost airline, Mason jar, mega-rich, messenger bag, Murano, Venice glass, retail therapy, starchitect, urban planning, young professional

United Airlines. 800/864–8331 for U.S. reservations, 800/538–2929 for international reservations, 02/69633707 within Italy | www.united.com. US Airways. 800/428–4322 for U.S. and Canada reservations, 800/622–1015 for international reservations, 848/813177 within Italy | www.usairways.com. Low-Cost Airlines Blu Express. 199/419777 within Italy, 06/98956677 from abroad | www.blu-express.com. Meridiana. 892/928 call center, 718/751–4499 from U.S., 0871/222 9319 from U.K. | www.meridiana.it. Ryanair. 44/8712460002 within the U.K., 899/552589 within Italy | ryanair.com. Wind Jet. 89/2020 | www.volawindjet.it. BUS TRAVEL An extensive network of bus lines that covers all of the Lazio region is operated by COTRAL (Consorzio Trasporti Lazio).

You can’t always do so cheaply. Calling from a hotel is almost always the most expensive option; hotels usually add huge surcharges to all calls, particularly international ones. Calling cards usually keep costs to a minimum, but only if you purchase them locally. In Italy, you can also place international calls from call centers. And then there are mobile phones —as expensive as mobile phone calls can be, they are still usually a much cheaper option than calling from your hotel. The country code for Italy is 39. The area code for Rome is 06. When dialing an Italian number from abroad, do not drop the initial 0 from the local area code.

.), with multilingual personnel, are near the most important sights and squares, as well as at Termini station and Leonardo da Vinci and Ciampino airports. They’re open 9–1 and 3–7:30 and provide information about cultural events, museums, opening hours, city transportation, and so on. You can also pick up free tourist maps and brochures. In Rome APT Tourist Information Office. Via Parigi 11, Termini | 00185 | 06/51687240. Call Center–Comune di Roma Ufficio Turismo. 06/0608 | www.060608.it. ENIT. (Italian Government Tourist Board). Via Marghera 2–6, Termini | 00185 | 06/49711, 039/039039 | www.italiantourism.com. ONLINE RESOURCES The Turismo Roma website is www.turismoroma.it and is packed with information about events and places to visit.


pages: 102 words: 27,769

Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

call centre, Clayton Christensen, Dean Kamen, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, fixed-gear, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Y Combinator

A pair of sneakers from Zappos is the same as a pair from Foot Locker or any other retailer. But Zappos sets itself apart by injecting CEO Tony Hsieh’s obsession with customer service into everything it does. At Zappos, customer-service employees don’t use scripts and are allowed to talk at length with customers. The call center and the company’s headquarters are in the same place, not oceans apart. And all Zappos employees—even those who don’t work in customer service or fulfillment—start out by spending four weeks answering phones and working in the warehouse. It’s this devotion to customer service that makes Zappos unique among shoe sellers.* Another example is Polyface, an environmentally friendly Virginia farm owned by Joel Salatin.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

The solution was simple: more education and entrepreneurship. If Shen in Shanghai could start a billion-dollar T-shirt company out of his apartment, then what would stop Suzy in Scranton from doing the same, using the same factories in Vietnam, while handling customer service virtually through a call center in Bangalore? There was a powerfully postindustrial romance running through this. With the aid of digital technology, we were now free to shift the focus of our economy from outdated, broken, dirty industries and professions (manufacturing, resource extraction, manual labor), and focus on the good jobs of the future, which were defined by information and creativity.

Technology is not at the heart of Detroit’s decline, which has its roots in racism, the auto industry’s and organized labor’s combined mismanagement in the face of global competition, and staggering political incompetence and corruption. But the digitally enabled globalization that impacted so many American businesses in the 1990s took hold in Detroit years before. The car companies pioneered the use of automated robots to replace human labor, and embraced outsourcing and offshoring long before India-based call centers became a popular phenomenon. When the Great Recession hit, it hit Detroit and the surrounding region harder than it did the rest of America. The real estate bubble’s collapse erased the modest wealth of many Detroiters, whose homes were their only asset, and the decline in consumption and stock prices squeezed auto manufacturers past the breaking point.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

Equally, since one-fifth of US GDP will be spent on healthcare by 2020, medical outsourcing is set to grow. This is where various services that used to be conducted by your local hospital (or at the 248 FUTURE FILES very least in your own country) are now exported to low-cost countries such as India, much in the same way that banks are outsourcing their call centers. Hospitals in the US send X-rays to India overnight via the internet for initial screening. We will slowly see the globalization and ultimately the commoditization of all but the most specialist medical services. Healthcare will therefore essentially become a retail market driven by brands (reputation), price and convenience and the patient will be firmly in control of most purchases.

Monitoring employee activity is nothing new — Henry Ford created a sociological department to assess whether his employees gambled or drank at home — but it is becoming more common and more pervasive, thanks to technology that makes it easier to find out where people are and what they are doing. For example, at most call centers the length of all conversations is monitored, as are lunch and toilet breaks. There is even software such as NetIntelligence that, by snooping on internet usage, shows bosses exactly what their staff are up to all day. This makes micromanagement relatively easy, but it also makes employees sick.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Like Rose, Kotkin assumes that prosperity is America’s natural condition and that the polity will make whatever decisions it must to keep the market healthy. His key argument is that our nation’s greater openness to immigration will keep our labor force, and therefore the economy, growing faster than Europe’s or Japan’s. Thus, he envisions an American heartland that might compete with India for call centers—not what most U.S. workers would regard as a happy future. As for China, he is not impressed: “The country’s lack of democratic institutions, its cultural hegemony, its historic insularity, and the rapid aging that will start by the 2020s do not augur well for its global preeminence.”11 Like Rose, Kotkin hedges his bets and so does not quite deliver the conclusion that Brooks has claimed for him.

Thus, the evidence available at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century provides little objective evidence for an eventual market-driven turnaround in the fortunes of the American middle class. One might imagine, of course, that the Chinese will keep buying the IOU’s needed to support our civilian and military overconsumption for the next hundred years; that call centers in Nebraska can compete with India while paying higher wages; or that U.S. global banks and corporations might lengthen their time horizons and contract their global ambitions. But that does not seem to be the wisest way to bet. Notes 1. The full text of the 2011 State of the Union address can be found online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2011. 2.


pages: 320 words: 96,006

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

These attributes—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly the province of men. In fact, they seem to come more easily to women. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men, to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs. In 2009, Icelanders made Johanna Sigurdardottir prime minister, electing the world’s first openly lesbian head of state. Sigurdardottir had campaigned explicitly against the male elite she claimed had destroyed the nation’s banking system, vowing to end the “age of testosterone.”

He’s studying to be a teacher, which Franklin especially appreciates because he can reach out to the next generation of boys. His high school friends all started out saying they could go to college, but few of them followed through. “They see the commercials and think it’s easy to get a degree,” Cameron told me. “But then they get there and they’re just not prepared for the work.” Instead they got jobs in call centers doing customer service or janitorial jobs where “there’s not much room to progress.” Cameron, now twenty-two, was the class clown in high school and when he graduated was also intimidated by the idea of getting a higher degree. He spent the first two years out of school working at a Taco Bell.


pages: 331 words: 96,989

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

They forget that exercise is primarily designed to make them healthier, developing stress-related injuries instead in the quest for arbitrary fitness goals. Beyond personal fitness devices, some companies gamify the workplace to motivate their employees. In 2000, four tech entrepreneurs formed a remote call center called LiveOps. LiveOps enlists more than twenty thousand everyday Americans to make telemarketing phone calls, and, more recently, to run the social media platforms of large organizations from Pizza Hut to Electronic Arts. The company vets agents before admitting them to its staff, and once accepted they can work as much or as little as they like in blocks of thirty minutes.

Some companies that use LiveOps pay by the minute—for example, twenty-five cents per minute spent on the phone—while others pay per call or per sale. LiveOps appeals to people without a fixed schedule—people who are employed part-time, at home with children, or between steady jobs. The company’s flexibility is a strength, but call center workers without a fixed schedule tend to suffer dips in motivation. To combat those dips, LiveOps introduced a gamified dashboard. Each worker’s dashboard contains a progress bar with the percentage of calls that produce sales, trophies and badges for reaching certain sales milestones, and individual challenges tackled and accomplished.


Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design by Giles Colborne

call centre, Firefox, Ford Model T, HyperCard, Menlo Park, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, sunk-cost fallacy

vision Download from WoweBook.com . —Steve Jobs Download from WoweBook.com Share it In 2002, Alan Colville was a product manager at Telewest, a British cable TV company. He’d been charged with upgrading the set top box software, a job that touched on every part of the company’s workforce, from software developers to call centers. As he described it: People at the company were pretty cynical about new projects and change was seen as a bad thing. Everything we’d done before was too complex, had needed fixing after it was released, and was irritatingly slow. We needed to show people that this project was going to be different in that it focused on our typical customers and their needs.


pages: 97 words: 31,550

Money: Vintage Minis by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, DeepMind, European colonialism, Flash crash, Ford Model T, greed is good, job automation, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, lifelogging, low interest rates, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Ponzi scheme, self-driving car, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

This idea has already been partly implemented by some customer-services departments, such as those pioneered by the Mattersight Corporation. Mattersight publishes its wares with the following blurb: ‘Have you ever spoken with someone and felt as though you just clicked? The magical feeling you get is the result of a personality connection. Mattersight creates that feeling every day, in call centers around the world.’ When you phone customer services with a request or complaint, Mattersight routes your call by a clever algorithm. You first state your reason for calling. The algorithm listens to your problem, analyses the words you have used and your tone of voice, and deduces not only your present emotional state but also your personality type – introverted, extroverted, rebellious or dependent.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Internet & Telephone Most places charge around RD$35 per hour for internet use. Abel Brawn’s Internet World (Plaza Lomba, 2nd fl; 9am-9pm Mon-Sat, 10am-4pm Sat) Fast internet access, as well as international phone service. Centro de Internet (Av Independencia 201; 8:30am-9pm Mon-Sat, to 3pm Sun) Internet and call center in Gazcue. Codetel Centro de Comunicaciones (El Conde 202; 8am-9:30pm) Large call center with internet access. Cyber Red (Sánchez 201; 9am-9pm Mon-Sat) Just off Calle El Conde; you can also make international calls here. Medical Services Clínica Abreu ( 809-687-4922; cnr Avs Independencia & Beller; 24hr) Widely regarded as the best hospital in the city, this is where members of many of the embassies go.

Information Emergency Politur ( 809-552-0848) There are 24-hour stations next to the bus terminal in Bávaro, in Cabeza de Toro and at the Punta Cana airport. Internet Access & Telephone Cone Xion.com (Plaza Punta Cana, B á varo; per hr RD$60; 9am-10pm Mon-Sat, to 11pm Sun) A small internet place and call center. Sea and Surf (El Cortecito; per hr RD$60; 9am-7pm) Along the main beach road in Cortecito proper. Medical Services All-inclusive hotels have small on-site clinics and medical staff, who can provide first aid and basic care. Head to one of several good private hospitals in the area for more serious issues.

Local calls cost US$0.14 per minute, national calls US$0.21 per minute. Toll-free numbers have 200 for their prefix (not the area code). The easiest way to make a phone call in the DR is to pay per minute (average rates to USA US$0.20, to Europe US$0.50, to Haiti US$0.50) at a Codetel Centro de Comunicaciones (Codetel) call center or an internet cafe. Local SIM cards can be used or cell phones can be set for roaming. There are GSM-suitable networks. Phonecards can be used at public phones and are available in denominations of RD$50, RD$100, RD$150, RD$200 and RD$250. Visas The majority of foreign travelers do not need a visa.


pages: 132 words: 31,976

Getting Real by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Matthew Linderman, 37 Signals

call centre, David Heinemeier Hansson, iterative process, John Gruber, knowledge worker, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe's law, performance metric, post-work, premature optimization, Ruby on Rails, slashdot, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, web application

Unfortunately, that means the software chefs never get to hear what customers are actually saying. That's problematic because listening to customers is the best way to get in tune with your product's strengths and weaknesses. The solution? Avoid building walls between your customers and the development/design team. Don't outsource customer support to a call center or third party. Do it yourself. You, and your whole team, should know what your customers are saying. When your customers are annoyed, you need to know about it. You need to hear their complaints. You need to get annoyed too. At 37signals, all of our support emails are answered personally by the people who actually build the product.


pages: 118 words: 35,663

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

is in this category, according to IBM Research executive Dario Gil, who headed a team that mapped out the progression. At this point, it’s still necessary to assemble teams of technology and domain experts to provide a learning system with the rules and information it needs to perform a certain well-defined task—then train it to use the information. One example is the customer-service call center. Today, when consumers call companies for help with technology problems, representatives read from scripts and search rigid knowledge-management systems for answers. The process is too often frustrating for the consumer and expensive for the company. Now, companies are training Watson to magnify the capabilities of their representatives.


Real-World Kanban by Mattias Skarin

call centre, continuous integration, Great Leap Forward, Kanban, loose coupling, pull request

The team handled pension issues and life-changing events for their customers—such as signing up new customers, processing payments and pension transfers, and tracking marriages and deaths. The team consisted of 14 people divided into two sub-teams—one with a consumer focus and the other with a corporate focus. Most of the time, the team interacted with a call center that acted as the bank’s front-line support team. Occasionally, they fielded direct requests from sales and IT teams. report erratum • discuss Chapter 5. Using Kanban in the Back Office: Outside IT • 86 This non-IT team needed to keep up with the company’s growth. The team needed to be able to add new members and get them up to speed quickly to keep up the pace instead of relying on a few senior members to handle the daily tasks.


pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

The methods they used to identify opportunities have remained in place through the company’s rapid growth. Managers start by asking each team to experiment with an opportunity—for example, testing the theory that Twilio could be used for call centers. Rather than be told what to build, the team is asked to figure out why customers haven’t already built the call centers themselves. The process starts with an exercise called PRFAQ, a technique used to test an idea through contact with customers to get the answer to that initial question. In the PRFAQ, the team writes a press release (similar to the Amazon process) and FAQ document for the customer, including information like the product launch date and cost (or at least a good estimate).


pages: 398 words: 108,889

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

With our management team spending time cutting deals, the rest of the company struggled to address the customer service crisis. Following a cross-country tour that took her through Reno, Boise, and Denver, Julie Anderson selected Omaha, Nebraska, as the location for X.com’s new customer service center. With a large, educated workforce and lower costs than Silicon Valley, the decision to set up the 500-person call center in Omaha made financial sense. It also elicited a fair amount of attention. Word of a California-based firm opening a division in the heartland attracted headlines in local papers and prompted Nebraska Governor Mike Johanns to attend the press conference announcing the decision.8 The media coverage paid immediate dividends; a recruiting session at the Holiday Inn in early April was flooded by job-seekers.

See also decision points for PayPal PayPal company culture, 2 annual offsite retreat, 292–295 blue hair dare, 198 compared with eBay’s, 296–299 executive time off, 218 growth of corporate feel to, 234, 262, 265, 301, 304 intellectual openness, 193 jokes, 282 parties, 246 PayPal competition better features, 41 better features at, 38 corporate intelligence about, 53, 93, 206, 266–267 major players, 84–85 PayMe, 61–63 strategy for defeating, 49–50. See also Billpoint; X.com “PayPal Damon,” 138–139, 211 PayPal departments auctions team, 277 business development team, 215 fraud investigators, 201, 202–203 new merchant services team, 212 new sales team, 214–215 outbound call center substitute, 209 . See also marketing team at PayPal PayPal employees annual reviews, 183 attitude toward pornography industry market, 216–217 departure from company, 303–304 number, at end of 2002, 297 number, in 2002, 261 number, in early 2000, 63 reaction to foray into gambling, 215 reaction to sale of PayPal, 282, 283, 287–288 response to delay of IPO, 245 PayPal IPO difficulties that followed, 309 filing, 223 importance of, 27 media coverage, 224, 225, 294 postponement, 240 pricing of, 236, 244 rescheduling, 243 tactic to speed up, 244 ticker symbol, 245 .


pages: 331 words: 104,366

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

The educated classes in the developed world have long had the luxury of lecturing their blue-collar brethren about the glories of the automated future. Service personnel have been on the block for decades—their friendly faces, human voices, and quick fingers replaced by ATMs, photocopiers, phone trees, and self-checkout lines. Airports have iPads instead of food servers. No sooner did massive call centers spring up around India than automated help-desk algorithms begin replacing them. It is far easier to tell millions of newly redundant workers to “retrain for the information age” or to “join the creative entrepreneurial economy” than to be one of them or to actually do it. And who can say how quickly all that new training will also become worthless?

What a luxury to sit in a climate-controlled room with access to the sum of human knowledge on a device in your pocket and lament how we don’t work with our hands anymore! There are still plenty of places in the world where people work with their hands all day, and also live without clean water and modern medicine. They are literally dying from a lack of technology. It’s not just college-educated professionals who are under pressure today. Call center employees in India are losing their jobs to artificially intelligent agents. Electronics assembly-line workers in China are being replaced by robots at a rate that would shock even Detroit. There is an entire generation of workers in the developing world who were often the first in their families to escape farming and other subsistence labor.


The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Boeing 747, call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, emotional labour, Frederick Winslow Taylor, job satisfaction, late capitalism, longitudinal study, new economy, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, telemarketer

In their Emotional Labor in the Twenty-first Century, Alicia Grandey, James Diefendorff, and Deborah Rupp discovered over ten thousand mentions of “emotional labor” (or “labour”) in academic articles, half of them since 2006, and 506 with the term in the title.1 I’m pleased that the idea has caught on but the real reason for such a burst of interest in the subject is, of course, the dramatic rise in the service sector itself. Indeed, as contributors to the American gross domestic product, the manufacturing sector has declined to 12 percent while the service sector has risen to 25 percent. Day-care centers, nursing homes, hospitals, airports, stores, call centers, classrooms, social welfare offices, dental offices—in all these workplaces, gladly or reluctantly, brilliantly or poorly, employees do emotional labor. ix x Preface to the 2012 Edition But how much of it do they do? And in what way? R. Cross, W. Baker, and A. Parker call some employees “energizers.”2 The coordinator of hospital volunteers, for example, may try to create a cheerful sense of shared mission.

Berger 2001 "The Association Between Emotion Work, Balance and Relationship Satisfaction of Couples Seeking Therapy," American Journal of Family Therapy V29 (N3):193-205. Holman, D., C. Chissick, and P. Totterdell 2002 "The Effects of Performance Monitoring on Emotional Labor and Well-Being in Call Centers," Motivation and Emotion V26(N1):57-8l. Hunter, B. 2001 "Emotion Work in Midwifery: A Review of Current Knowledge," Journal of Advanced Nursing V34 (N4) :436-444. Jacobs, Jerry A. and Ronnie]. Steinberg 1990 "Compensating Differentials and the Male-Female Wage Gap: Evidence from the New York State Comparable Worth Study," Social Forces 69 (2) :439-68.


pages: 344 words: 104,077

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

But, of course, there are limits to doing such large-scale experiments. Small-scale interventions can also be useful, however. For instance, many businesses use “mystery shoppers” to evaluate the performance of employees who deal with the public in retail stores, restaurants, and customer-service call centers. The mystery shoppers use an organization’s services just as any customer would—eating a hamburger, buying clothes, or calling a telephone help line. The employees of the organization being evaluated think the mystery shoppers are just ordinary customers and presumably treat them as they would anyone else.

Even though some people find the idea of a machine as a manager threatening, we already live with them every day. Think about a traffic light, for instance. Instead of a human police officer in the intersection directing traffic, a machine plays that role. Or think about the workers in a telephone call center. A machine automatically routes calls to them—a task that could be performed by a human manager. But most people don’t find either of these situations threatening or problematic. I think it’s likely that there will be many more examples of machines playing the role of managers in the future. For instance, the CrowdForge system, developed by my friends Aniket Kittur, Robert Kraut, and their colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, uses online workers to write documents like encyclopedia articles.7 We’ll call the online workers Turkers because they are recruited from an Amazon service called Mechanical Turk, which we’ll see in more detail later.


pages: 324 words: 106,699

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

They wore blazers and slacks and even blouses and skirts; this was one of the few places in the CIA tech world at the time where I recall seeing a sizable number of women. Some of them had the blue badges that identified them as government employees, or, as contractors called them, “govvies.” They spent their shifts picking up banks of ringing phones and talking people in the building or out in the field through their tech issues. It was a sort of IC version of call-center work: resetting passwords, unlocking accounts, and going by rote through the troubleshooting checklists. “Can you log out and back in?” “Is the network cable plugged in?” If the govvies, with their minimal tech experience, couldn’t deal with a particular issue themselves, they’d escalate it to more specialized teams, especially if the problem was happening in the “Foreign Field,” meaning CIA stations overseas in places like Kabul or Baghdad or Bogotá or Paris.

Besides having a political consciousness (libertarian to the point of stockpiling Krugerrands) and an abiding interest in subjects outside of tech (he read vintage mysteries and thrillers in paperback), he was a fifty-something been-there-done-that ex-navy radio operator who’d managed to graduate from the call center’s ranks thanks to being a contractor. I have to say, when I first met Frank, I thought: Imagine if my entire life were like the nights I spent at CASL. Because, to put it frankly, Frank did hardly any work at all. At least, that was the impression he liked to project. He enjoyed telling me, and everyone else, that he didn’t really know anything about computing and didn’t understand why they’d put him on such an important team.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

But it also involved the destruction of millions of “old” jobs, particularly in manufacturing and, most painfully, in coal mining. Many of the individuals made unemployed never really recovered. It was next to impossible to take a 50-year-old miner, who was almost without exception male, and transform him into a customer-facing call center operative. The people filling this role were, almost without exception, female. And this problem didn’t just affect isolated individuals. Because the economic activities hit by technological and policy change were geographically concentrated, whole communities and even regions suffered. Indeed, many communities and regions have still not fully recovered from the loss of their primary economic activity and source of employment.

This is the route to advance taken by Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Hong Kong. These countries were able to register impressive increases in exports, thereby enabling them to benefit from economies of scale. At first, this was restricted to manufacturing, but with the communications revolution it spread to parts of the service sector. Call center work and basic accounting and legal work have increasingly been transferred to cheaper centers abroad, particularly in India. But in the new world of the robot and AI, labor costs will be of diminished relevance. If you can get goods manufactured cheaply with little human input, why locate manufacturing in Asia when you can manufacture locally and thus avoid transport costs and delays?


pages: 382 words: 105,657

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, call centre, chief data officer, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Future Shock, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, knowledge worker, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, performance metric, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, éminence grise

She said the FAA needed to be more responsive to its customers—by which she meant manufacturers and airlines, not the flying public. She expressed sympathy for the inconsistent answers and long waits they sometimes experienced—as if the country’s top aviation authority was some kind of corporate call center—without mentioning the funding shortfalls that had starved it of resources. That year happened to be the centennial of the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903, and she titled her speech “The Spirit of December 14th.” As she pointed out, this wasn’t the date of their historic twelve-second flight, but three days earlier, when Wilbur stalled the Flyer and crashed it into the dunes.

In 2007 the company signed a $1.2 billion contract with Tata Consultancy Services, an outsourcing firm based in India. It was the largest such arrangement ever signed to that point, and it allowed Nielsen to replace more expensive employees who gathered market data in the United States. The deal caused controversy in Oldsmar, Florida, where the company had taken tax breaks to build a call center. It began laying off hundreds of people, while asking them to train their replacements at Tata. One city council member accused Nielsen, then the largest employer in the Tampa Bay suburb, of “making a joke of the tax-incentive program.” Another said it was a poor corporate citizen. (Nielsen agreed to give up the tax breaks.)


pages: 470 words: 107,074

California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--And What It Means for America's Power Grid by Katherine Blunt

An Inconvenient Truth, benefit corporation, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, call centre, commoditize, confounding variable, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, forensic accounting, Google Earth, high-speed rail, junk bonds, lock screen, market clearing, market design, off-the-grid, price stability, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, vertical integration

PG&E directed customers to its website to determine whether their home or business would lose power. Millions of people tried to pull it up to find an interactive tool that was supposed to check the status of a given address. The site crashed under the onslaught of traffic, loading as a useless blank page just when it was most needed. Phones in the company’s call centers rang nonstop. PG&E didn’t have enough time or people to answer all of them. Meanwhile, employees were frantically trying to contact 30,000 customers who relied on electricity for medical reasons. The company maintained a registry of people who used respirators, electric wheelchairs, or dialysis machines, or who had conditions that required their homes to be kept at certain temperatures.

It runs contrary to the reason any of us ever got into this business,” he said. “But as I look back at last week, one of the things that stands out in my mind is that we actually didn’t have any catastrophic fires in Northern and central California.” Johnson acknowledged the company’s failings. He promised it would bolster its website and its call centers and do more to tell customers when it needed to turn off the lights. It would install more sectionalizers, the devices that allow for a more surgical approach to shutoffs. It would cut more trees and insulate some of its wires to protect them from flying branches. In some communities at high risk, it would build self-contained power grids that could stay online even when the surrounding area went dark.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

“Investors will not come if their supervisors and managers can only guess what our workers are saying,” the prime minister explained. “Poor English reflects badly on us and makes us seem less intelligent.” The Philippines fell, too. Despite Manuel Quezon’s quest to establish a national indigenous language to dislodge it, English remains both an official language and a constant presence. The Philippines has more call-center workers than any other country. It’s also an international center for teaching English, a place where aspiring speakers can learn the language cheaply, with a clear mainland accent. English’s gravitational pull extends far beyond the domain where Anglophone powers promoted their language. It would be hard to find a place further removed, culturally or politically, from Washington and London than Mongolia.

It would be hard to find a place further removed, culturally or politically, from Washington and London than Mongolia. But in 2004 its prime minister, a Harvard graduate, announced that English would replace Russian as the first foreign language in Mongolian schools. He hoped to turn Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, into a hub for call centers. “Conquer English to make China stronger”: Li Yang, the media personality who is China’s most popular English teacher, claims to have taught millions in his campaign to turn China into a global hegemon through the mastery of English. The most remarkable conquest by English has been China. In 1978, under the reformist premier Deng Xiaoping, China restored English as a permissible foreign language and encouraged it as part of China’s path to prosperity.

., Post-Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940–1990 (Berlin, 1996). “Investors will not”: Goh Chok Tong, quoted in Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew, Emergent Lingua Francas and World Orders: The Politics and Place of English as a World Language (New York, 2009), 141. call-center workers: Funie Hsu, “The Coloniality of Neoliberal English: The Enduring Structures of American Colonial English Instruction in the Philippines and Puerto Rico,” L2 Journal 7 (2015): 124, 139–40. Mongolia: Nicholas Ostler, The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (New York, 2010), 15.


pages: 704 words: 182,312

This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World: A Practitioners' Handbook by Marc Stickdorn, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, Jakob Schneider

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, different worldview, Eyjafjallajökull, fail fast, glass ceiling, Internet of things, iterative process, Kanban, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, RFID, scientific management, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, stealth mode startup, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, urban planning, work culture

This also includes boundary conditions for the project in terms of budget, time, and other resources (and beyond). Often, however, you will not be approached with a perfect brief. Rather, people might have identified more of a rough starting point; an unmet need, a wish, a problem, or a seemingly brilliant idea like “We need to reduce the call volume in the call center by 10%,” “Develop that new service idea,” “We have this new technology, come up with something so we can sell it,” “Create new innovative business ideas,” “Fix the 20% drop in our NPS score,” “Improve the conversion rate of our online sales channel,” “Redesign the employee onboarding,” and so on.

To make them more probable, you need to look behind the perceived problem or opportunity; to understand the needs; to generate, prototype, and test concepts; and to iterate. That’s not one workshop. The purpose of the workshop needs to be clear to the sponsor and (usually) to the participants. 18 If you decide to tell them, tell them clearly: “We are here today to find out what really goes on in this part of the call center.” Planning the work Group facilitation takes place over various time frames, which we can think of as the project scale (months, weeks) and the session scale (hours, days). Planning the facilitation will be a matter of choosing activities and allocating resources along this timeline. Project-level planning will usually follow whatever innovation or design structure the organization and facilitator choose, such as the typical iterative process of research, ideation, prototyping, and implementation. 19 Within a single session there might be less ground to cover, and thus more freedom for the facilitator.

However, this requires a corporate strategy that includes a commitment on service design; long-term management buy-in; internal service design competence; a shared language of service design; and a working process that is adapted to corporate structures, processes, and culture. If not, you might raise expectations that you probably cannot deliver with your first round of projects. Name individual project teams according to the subject of their project, such as “call center improvement team” or “work group for online shopping experience.” These unsuspicious names do not reflect the underlying method and help to reduce prejudices and barriers. Mentioning the subject matter also helps to generate a common understanding and identity. Members of the service design core team will usually not name service design as the underlying approach.


pages: 119 words: 36,128

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed by Laurie Kilmartin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, call centre, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, Uber for X

They’re on the lookout for a lonely, broken-hearted person who will believe any hare-brained idea about heaven, and right now that person is you. If they’re not coming to you, don’t go to them: Psychics are off limits. So are palm-readers and tarot-card readers. In fact, for the first six months after your loved one dies, you aren’t even allowed to watch Dr. Phil. REMEMBER: It’s okay to reveal your weakness, but only to people in a call center in india. Morternity Leave: You Deserve at Least Six Weeks Off After You Give Death To paraphrase Maya Angelou, when the hospital sends your loved one home to die, believe them. Hospitals don’t like to admit defeat. They want your loved one alive as long as possible, until no more med students can learn from them.


pages: 121 words: 36,908

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

The technology is already being tested to assist doctors in processing the enormous volume of medical literature to better diagnose patients, which in fact was the system’s original purpose. But it is also being released as the “Watson Engagement Advisor,” which is intended for customer service and technical support applications. By responding to free-form natural language queries from users, this software could potentially replace the call center workers (many in places like India) who currently perform this work. The review of legal documents, an extremely time-consuming process traditionally performed by legions of junior lawyers, is another promising application of the technology. Another area of rapid advance is robotics, the interaction of machinery with the physical world.


pages: 161 words: 39,526

Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders by Mariya Yao, Adelyn Zhou, Marlene Jia

Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cognitive load, computer vision, conceptual framework, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, natural language processing, new economy, OpenAI, pattern recognition, performance metric, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, skunkworks, software is eating the world, source of truth, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, strong AI, subscription business, technological singularity, The future is already here

Customer Support Customer support has become increasingly important, with analysts predicting that it will overtake product and price as the number one way for a business to differentiate itself by 2020.(91) About 64 percent of consumers now expect real-time responses at any time, and 65 percent say they are likely to switch brands if they receive inconsistent customer service across platforms (online, in-store, phone, text, or via email).(92) However, customer care is expensive. Call centers house hundreds of thousands of agents at a cost of four to twelve dollars per service request.(93) Though customer service has traditionally relied on human empathy to resolve issues, the pressure to keep costs down has made some degree of automation an imperative. We believe that customer experience is one of the most fruitful areas for the application of artificial intelligence, and machine intelligence can be used to better understand what customers need and to deliver consistently amazing experiences for them.


pages: 361 words: 111,500

Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Exxon Valdez, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, indoor plumbing, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, tech worker, Transnistria, union organizing

I’d heard of a new, popular guru named Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. He has long, silky black hair and a serene smile. He is a mainstream guru, if such a thing is possible. Sri Sri’s ashram is located just outside of Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley. Bangalore is New India, the India of call centers and shopping malls—“India Shining,” as one political party calls it. Many of the city’s software engineers and call-center workers—cybercoolies, as they’re called—escape to the ashram whenever they can. New India turns to Old India for salvation or, at least, for a bit of downtime. Driving to the ashram in a taxi, we pass cows, dogs, meat hanging from hooks, tailor shops, a gleaming office building for Oracle, a sign for “Speak Easy English.”


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Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

By the final, most complicated set, the extroverts were much more likely than the introverts to abandon the task altogether. Introverts sometimes outperform extroverts even on social tasks that require persistence. Wharton management professor Adam Grant (who conducted the leadership studies described in chapter 2) once studied the personality traits of effective call-center employees. Grant predicted that the extroverts would be better telemarketers, but it turned out that there was zero correlation between extroversion levels and cold-calling prowess. “The extroverts would make these wonderful calls,” Grant told me, “but then a shiny object of some kind would cross their paths and they’d lose focus.”

See also John Weinman, “Noncognitive Determinants of Perceptual Problem-Solving Strategies,” Personality and Individual Differences 8, no. 1 (1987): 53–58. 47. Raven Standard Progressive Matrices: Vidhu Mohan and Dalip Kumar, “Qualitative Analysis of the Performance of Introverts and Extroverts on Standard Progressive Matrices,” British Journal of Psychology 67, no. 3 (1976): 391–97. 48. personality traits of effective call-center employees: Interview with the author, February 13, 2007. 49. if you were staffing an investment bank: Interview with the author, July 7, 2010. 50. men who are shown erotic pictures: Camelia Kuhnen et al., “Nucleus Accumbens Activation Mediates the Influence of Reward Cues on Financial Risk Taking,” NeuroReport 19, no. 5 (2008): 509–13. 51. all introverts are constantly … vigilant about threats: Indeed, many contemporary personality psychologists would say that threat-vigilance is more characteristic of a trait known as “neuroticism” than of introversion per se. 52. threat-vigilance is more characteristic of a trait: But harm avoidance is correlated with both introversion and neuroticism (both traits are associated with Jerry Kagan’s “high reactivity” and Elaine Aron’s “high sensitivity”).


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Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

For three decades it squandered those advantages, but there are signs of a turnaround, the most dramatic being the rise of the Philippines as a rival to India in “business process outsourcing”—the industry that provides the operators who answer calls for customer service at almost any major global company. Call centers did not exist in the Philippines a decade ago, and now it’s a $9 billion industry employing 350,000 people. These centers are starting to open outside metro Manila and pop up all over the islands of the Philippines, to the point that some analysts think it may turn into another successful case of Southeast Asian archipelago capitalism.

., 177 Bradford, 212 brand management, 53–54, 90, 159, 162, 165, 167 Brazil, 59–72 agriculture in, 64, 66, 232 assets of, 59 banking in, 62, 69–70 billionaires in, 71, 78 budget limits in, 66, 70–71 capital markets in, 69, 70–71 China compared with, 61, 62, 63–64, 65, 66, 68–70, 71 constitution of, 64 consumer prices in, 12, 42, 59–61, 62, 66, 67–68, 71, 138, 232 currency of (real), 12, 13–14, 59–61, 62, 66, 67, 68–69, 232, 233 economic reforms in, 62–63, 66–67, 71–72 economy of, 12–13, 28, 61–72, 226 education in, 63, 65 as emerging market, 3–4, 7, 59–61, 63, 65–66, 67, 69–71, 85, 106, 113, 176, 253 factories in, 67, 68 financial crises in, 61–62 foreign investment in, 59, 63, 64, 66, 68–72 foreign trade of, 59, 61, 62, 67–68, 72, 159, 220, 223, 226, 232, 233–34 GDP of, 3–4, 63, 65, 66, 67, 72 in global economy, 68–71 government of, 42, 59, 63, 65, 66–67, 70–71, 72, 210, 248 government spending in, 42, 63, 65, 66–67, 70–71, 72 growth rate of, 3–4, 7, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 61–64, 66, 67, 68–71, 88, 207, 235, 244, 246 health care in, 63 high-context society in, 39–40 hotels and restaurants in, 12, 59–61, 65 housing prices in, 61 immigration to, 95 income levels of, 8, 61, 63, 72, 75, 113 India compared with, 10, 39–43, 61, 70 inflation rate in, 42, 62, 66, 68–69, 248, 249 infrastructure of, 61, 64, 65, 69 interest rates in, 62, 67, 68–70 labor market in, 64–65 leadership of, 59, 61, 63, 66–67, 70–72, 210 loan defaults by, 61–62, 66 media coverage in, 70–71 Mexico compared with, 71, 75 “momento magico” of, 59 national debt of, 61–62, 66 natural resources of, 10, 59, 61, 63, 67–68, 69, 133, 159, 220, 226, 232, 233–34, 235 oil industry of, 63, 67–68 political situation in, 66–69 poverty in, 41, 66 productivity of, 63–64, 68 social stability in, 61–64, 66, 67, 71, 72 stock market of, 10, 59, 69–71, 233 taxation in, 63 transportation in, 64, 69, 85, 212–13 “trilemma” of, 68–69 unemployment in, 64–65 U.S. compared with, 12–13, 61, 66, 72 wage levels in, 42, 62, 65 wealth in, 12–13, 71 welfare programs of, 41, 42, 61, 63, 72 breakout nations, vii–x, 2, 10–16, 38–39, 49, 61, 89–90, 113, 244–46 see also specific nations bribes, 93, 137 BRICS, 253 bridges, 51, 195 bubbles, investment, 2–6, 107, 223–39 Budapest, 97 Buddhism, 199 budgets, x, 66, 70–71, 139–40 Buffett, Warren, 163 Bulgaria, 100, 109, 187 “bulldozer leadership,” 161 Bumiputeras people, 148–49 Burj Al Arab, 219 Burma, 10 Burundi, 209 Busan, 136 Bush, George W., 4–5 business cycles, 2, 5–6, 11, 223 Cairo, 128 Calderón, Felipe, 78, 79–80, 82 California, 24 Çalik, Ahmet, 123 call centers, 141 Cambodia, 188 cameras, 237 Cameroon, 89 Canada, 26, 180, 215, 223 Canal Istanbul, 116 Cape Town, 171, 175 Cap Ferrat, 94 capital controls, 178, 189–90, 252 Capital Economics, 21 capital flows, viii, x, 4, 69, 70–71, 93–94, 107, 131, 178, 189–90, 201, 228–30, 236, 238, 252 capitalism, 8–9, 10, 17–18, 25, 26–30, 38–39, 42, 46–47, 49, 50–51, 58, 62, 69–70, 71, 77, 106, 117, 118–19, 136, 141, 174, 197, 200–202, 218, 228–30, 252 “cappuccino economy,” 182 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 66 cargo ships, 200–201 cartels, 74, 75–76, 79–80, 208 Carter, Jimmy, 248 casinos, 201 Cayman Islands, 160 cement, 75, 135, 137, 139, 213 CEMEX, 75 , 81 Central Asia, 95, 113, 123, 166 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 30 Chaayu Blu resort, 196 chain stores, 53 change agents, 2–3 Chaser, The, 167 Chávez, Hugo, 190, 215 Chechnya, 85, 89, 96 checking accounts, 62 Chery, 161 Chhattisgarh, 46 Chiang Kai-shek, 165 chief executive officers (CEOs), 2, 60, 64, 72, 224 children, x, 21–22, 169 Chile, 41, 75 China, 15–34 agriculture in, 9, 17–18, 21, 22, 27, 41–42 auto industry of, 161 baby-boom generations in, 21–22, 37–38 banking in, 24, 25, 26, 92, 252 billionaires in, 25, 45, 91 Brazil compared with, 61, 62, 63–64, 65, 66, 68–70, 71 capitalist reforms in, 8–9, 17–18, 25, 26–30, 62, 69–70, 71, 106, 117, 118–19, 197, 200–202, 252 Communist regime of, 21–22, 25, 26–30, 117, 202–3, 247 consumer prices in, 16, 18, 22–23, 24, 25, 31–32, 53 credit market in, 32 currency of (yuan), 32–33, 68, 131, 132, 246–47, 254 demographics of, 17–18, 21–22, 37–38, 53 economic slowdown in, 17, 18–21, 32–34, 233–35, 241–42 economy of, 15–34, 197, 204, 227, 236, 241–42 as emerging market, 3–4, 7, 10, 87, 153, 164, 231, 253 emigration from, 82, 95 export-manufacturing zones in, 28 factories in, 17–18, 22–23, 28, 132, 230 five-year plans of, 20, 27 forecasts on, 2, 17, 18, 31–32 foreign currency reserves of, 26, 32–33 foreign investment in, 9, 18, 20, 32, 68–70, 183, 225 foreign trade of, 18, 20–21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32–33, 120, 148 GDP of, 1, 3–4, 17, 18, 20, 26, 32, 65, 85, 139, 236, 243, 252 “ghost cities” in, 16, 24–25 as global economy, 1, 2, 18–19, 230, 233–36, 241–42 growth rate of, 3–4, 7, 8–9, 11, 12, 16–21, 26, 29–34, 51, 58, 61, 62, 63–64, 68–69, 87, 118–19, 132, 133, 136, 187, 201–2, 204, 223, 224, 233–35, 241–42, 245, 254 Han population of, 53 as high-context society, 41 highways in, 17, 20, 21, 65, 231 housing market in, 16, 18, 24–25, 28–29, 31, 32 income levels of, 8, 11, 16–21, 24–25, 58, 86 India compared with, 1, 10, 19, 25, 36, 37–38, 41, 45, 47, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58 Indonesia compared with, 132–33, 135, 136 inflation rates in, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 31, 33, 248 infrastructure of, 20–21, 62, 65, 236 Japan compared with, 18, 20, 22, 24, 31, 32–33 labor market in, 17, 21–23, 27, 32, 47, 164, 170, 246–47 labor unrest in, 17, 22–23, 32, 47 leadership of, 8–9, 17, 26–28, 32, 33, 47, 71, 132, 200–203, 248 manufacturing sector of, 17–18, 22–23, 28, 132, 230, 235 media coverage of, 21, 22–23 Middle Kingdom of, 199 migrant workers in, 22–23, 27 national debt of, 17, 18, 252 natural resources imported by, 19, 61, 229, 230, 231, 233–36 one-child policy of, 21–22 population of, 17–18, 19, 21–22, 37–38, 53, 56, 57, 82 ports of, 20–21, 62, 65, 200–201 privatization in, 24–25, 252 productivity of, 63–64, 68, 80 public transportation in, 15–16, 20, 21, 22–23, 65, 231 residency permits (hukou) in, 27, 29 rural areas of, 17–18, 21, 22–23, 27, 41–42, 57 Russia compared with, 19, 25, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92 savings rate in, 31, 62, 119 social unrest in, 24–26, 27, 28, 31–32, 47 South Korea compared with, 158–59, 161 state-owned enterprises in, 69, 88, 252 stock market of, 26, 69–70, 88, 189 Taiwan compared with, 155, 164, 169–70 telecommunications in, 207, 237, 238, 239 Thailand compared with, 39 Turkey compared with, 117, 118–20, 122 unemployment in, 32, 62 urban areas of, 21, 22–25, 31, 33, 57 U.S. compared with, 17, 18, 24, 237, 238, 239, 241–42, 246–47 Vietnam compared with, 30, 199, 200–203, 204 wage levels in, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 45, 80, 91, 132 wealth in, 25, 31–32, 236 women in, 21, 24, 31 Chinese language, 53 Chinese Nationalists, 165 Chissano, Joaquim, 195, 206 Christianity, 123, 211 Chrysler, 75 Chung Ju Young, 161 Chung Mong Koo, 162 Churchill, Winston S., 49 Cinnamon Lodge resort, 196 Citibank, 91 Ciudad Juárez, 79 Clinton, Bill, 225–26 CLSA, 238 CNBC, 70–71 coal, 133, 135, 170, 180, 225 Coca-Cola, 75 coffee, 67, 69, 232 Cold War, 86, 87, 134 Coleman, 247 college endowments, viii Collor de Mello, Fernando, 66 Colombo, 191, 192 Commission on Growth and Development, 235 “commodity.com” illusion, 223–39 “commodity supercycle,” 223 Commonwealth Games, 42 Communism, 4, 21–22, 25, 26–30, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 97, 102, 103, 104, 111, 117, 170, 175, 199–200, 202–3, 247 computers, 158, 164, 203–4, 236–39 Confucianism, 199 conglomerates, 125–26, 134, 138, 161–63, 167–69, 178 Congo, Democratic Republic of, 205, 209 Congo, Republic of, 4 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 175, 181 Congress Party, 39, 41–42, 47–49, 55–56, 174, 176 conspicuous consumption, 6 construction industry, 123, 166, 213 consumer electronics, 147–48 consumer prices, 6, 12, 16, 18, 22–23, 24, 25, 31–32, 38, 39, 42, 49, 52–54, 57, 59–61, 62, 66, 67–68, 71, 75–76, 83–84, 86, 87, 94, 121, 126, 137–38, 157, 179, 232, 235 container vessels, 200–201 contracts, labor, 17 Coolidge, Calvin, 39 copper, 19, 120, 141, 223, 224, 229, 231 Cornerstone Analytics, 227 corporate governance, 134 corporate taxes, 63, 76, 126–27, 214–15, 254 corruption, 25, 76–77, 89, 91, 93, 107, 117–18, 134–35, 137, 151, 204–5, 206, 209, 210, 217 see also graft counterrevolution, 111, 118, 125–26 creative destruction, 46 credit, 8, 32, 38, 42, 43–44, 45, 46–47, 49–51, 58, 150, 157, 202 credit cards, 8, 157 Credit Suisse, 50 crime rate, 71, 78, 181, 211 “crony capitalism,” 10, 25, 38, 42, 46–47, 49, 50–51, 58, 131, 139 Cuba, 191 cuisine, 52–53 currencies, 4–5, 9, 12, 13–14, 26, 28, 32–33, 59–61, 62, 66, 67, 68–69, 73, 80, 92–93, 100–108, 115, 120, 131, 132, 146–47, 149, 159–60, 178, 179, 196, 209, 232, 233, 243, 246–47, 254 “czarist mentality,” 96 Czech Republic: auto industry of, 103 banking in, 103, 105–7 as breakout nation, 99–100 currency of (koruna), 108 as emerging market, 106, 110 as Eurozone candidate, 11, 99–100, 106–8, 109, 254 GDP of, 100 growth rate of, 97, 99–104, 244–45 inflation rate of, 249 national debt of, 105–6 population of, 106 post-Communist era of, 97, 102, 104, 111 Dae Jang Geum, 167 Daewoo, 160, 162 day traders, 220, 224 debt, national, 4, 5–6, 8, 17, 18, 24, 57, 61–62, 66, 76, 80–81, 85, 86, 92–93, 100, 105–6, 119–22, 134–35, 170, 176, 177, 231, 252 debt, personal, 8, 57–58, 157, 182–83 defaults, 61–62, 66, 252–53 deficits, x, 109–10, 147, 254 Delhi, vii–viii, 43 Dell, 158 democracy, 29–30, 48–49, 50, 55–56, 58, 77, 89, 96, 114, 118, 119, 123, 127, 143, 156, 173–76, 194, 205 Democratic Alliance Party, 175–76 Democratic Republic of Congo, see Congo, Democratic Republic of “demographic dividend,” 37–38, 55–56, 58, 126 demographics, 17–18, 21–22, 37–38, 55–56, 58, 126, 225, 231–32 Deng Xiaoping, 8–9, 17, 25, 26–28, 199, 200–201 dependency ratio, 37–38 Detroit, 162 devaluations, currency, 62, 108, 132 developing countries, vii–x, 2, 7, 10–16, 20, 28, 38–39, 42, 44, 49, 61, 65, 68, 89–90, 113, 123, 158, 184–91, 204–8, 233–39, 242–4 commodity exports of, 204, 223–39 see also breakout nations diamonds, 176, 205 dictatorships, 29–30, 127, 173, 246 Disney, 3 DMK, 48 Dogus family, 125 dollar, 7, 13–14, 18, 32–33, 59, 67, 70, 73, 103, 131, 132, 232, 233, 234, 243 “domestic content” rules, 213 Domino’s Pizza, 53 dotcom bubble, 3, 6, 157, 164, 189, 223–24, 225, 227, 230 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 9, 47 dowries, 145 “Dr.


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The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Airbnb has become the largest “hotel chain” in the world, yet they don’t own a single hotel room. They leverage (that is, rent out) the assets (spare bedrooms) of the crowd. These models also lean on staff-on-demand, which provides a company with the agility needed to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Sure, this once meant call centers in India, but today it’s everything from micro-task laborers behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk on the low end to Kaggle’s data scientist-on-demand service on the high end. The Free/Data Economy: This is the platform version of the “bait and hook” model, essentially baiting the customer with free access to a cool service (like Facebook) and then making money off the data gathered about that customer (also like Facebook).

Simply by analyzing customer voice intonation, the system can tell whether the person on the phone is about to blow a gasket, is genuinely excited, or anything in between. Based on research conducted on more than seventy thousand subjects in more than thirty different languages, Beyond Verbal’s app can detect four hundred different markers of human moods, attitudes, and personality traits. Already it’s been integrated in call centers to help human sales agents understand and react to customer emotions, making those calls more pleasant, but also more profitable. For example, by analyzing word choice and vocal style, Beyond Verbal’s system can tell what kind of shopper the person on the line actually is. If they’re an early adopter, the AI alerts the sales agent to offer them the latest and greatest.


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Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Highly educated workers are the most satisfied and the least educated the least satisfied.39 The same more positive story can be found in general indicators of well-being that have been holding steady or even rising in many rich countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, although the highest measures of well-being do tend to be correlated with high levels of education and with professional careers.II These benign trends probably have something to do with the decline in the number of routine manual occupations and manufacturing operations in Britain and other rich countries. For all the nostalgia about industrial jobs, for most people, working in a call center is preferable to working on a production line. But the same BSA survey and other workplace data points to less benign data, too, about the rise in stress levels and reductions in autonomy. In 2015, 37 percent said they found work stressful either always or often, up from 28 percent in 1989, with a slightly higher proportion saying this in professional and managerial jobs.40 But Hand and Heart workers have been hit hardest on the loss of autonomy in recent years.

The compelling conclusion to emerge from over 250 face to face interviews with these leaders, public and private, is that the relationship between education, jobs and incomes is being transformed in ways that cast doubt on the traditional rhetoric that ‘learning equals earning’ and the crucial role education plays in creating middle-class jobs.”3 German carmakers—who, as recently as the late 1990s, thought it would be impossible to make top-end cars outside Baden-Württemberg, let alone Germany—are now building their entire product range in emerging economies. They were among the last to succumb to the globalization of industry, which is now an old story. But now in services it is increasingly the same story: emerging economies are no longer restricted to data entry and call center functions. Brown and Lauder cite a global law firm headquartered in New York that has moved some of the work previously given to newly qualified lawyers in London or New York with annual salaries of around $100,000 to law graduates in the Philippines, where the same work is done for less than $15,000.4 The barriers to higher education that previously protected the Western middle class are falling.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

In Russia, there are companies such as Yandex and Vkontakte operating in the search and social networking markets, companies with close links to the government but which nonetheless compete nationally with Google, Facebook, and the rest of the US social quantification sector.60 India’s approach in the IT sector, meanwhile, has been to leverage cheap labor and engineering expertise to attract global investment. But in contrast with yesterday’s image of the Indian call center providing customer support for Western companies, India’s current IT sector represents a burgeoning ecosystem of start-ups, technology developers, and service providers of global reach. This infrastructure is being developed in close collaboration with the state through public–private partnerships.

Social power may come to mean, in part, being a net controller of the benefits and costs of surveillance, just as under industrial capitalism management power meant controlling the flow of knowledge and information that made up work.30 The consequences of how people are surveilled and evaluated will also vary depending on how much a person’s role retains zones of discretion. Being “judged by results” means something very different if you are a call-center worker tracked from moment to moment (in real time and/or retrospectively) rather than the director of a stock-exchange-listed company or university professor judged by end-of-year results. Direct, on-the-body, moment-to-moment surveillance and correction is likely to be closely correlated with lower status.


Central America by Carolyn McCarthy, Greg Benchwick, Joshua Samuel Brown, Alex Egerton, Matthew Firestone, Kevin Raub, Tom Spurling, Lucas Vidgen

airport security, Bartolomé de las Casas, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, digital map, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, land reform, liberation theology, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Return to beginning of chapter TELEPHONE Many internet cafes offer clear, inexpensive phone service using high-speed internet connections. Calls to the US typically cost L1 to L2 per minute. Expect to pay a bit more to call Europe: per minute L2 to L3. Hondutel (www.hondutel.hn) has call centers at its offices throughout the country. Rates to the US are competitive at just L2 per minute, but prices to Europe are an outrageous and unrealistic L43.85 per minute. Calls to the rest of the world are higher as well. Call centers are usually open from 7am until around 9pm every day. Some Hondutel offices and internet cafes with phone service have fax services. Prices vary widely, but are usually per page, as opposed to per minute.

Police ( 199, 222-8736; 5a Av; 24hr) Immigration Immigration office ( 238-5613; Anillo Periférico near Universidad Technólogica de Honduras; 8:30am-4:30pm Mon-Fri) Extends visas and handles immigration matters. Internet Access Hondutel ( 222-8107; cnr Av Cristóbal Colón & Calle El Telégrafo; 7am-8:30pm Mon-Sat) Multinet Colonia Palmira (Centro Comercial Plaza Criolla, Blvr Morazán; per hr L30; 8am-7pm Mon-Sat); Centro (Calle Peatonal; per hr L18; 8:30am-8pm) Reliable chain internet cafe and call center. Mundo Virtual ( 238-0062; Calle Salvador Mendieta; per hr L25; 8am-9pm Mon-Sat, 9am-8pm Sun) Professional staff, lots of flat screens. Laundry Dry Cleaning Lavandería Maya ( 232-5923; Av Maipú, Colonia Palmira; per 4.5kg L140; 7am-6pm Mon-Fri, 8am-4pm Sat) Su-perc Jet ( 237-4155; Av Máximo Jérez/Juan Gutemberg, Barrio Guanacaste; per 500g L12; 8am-5pm Mon-Sat) Money Unibanc ATMs are dotted about the city, including the airport, on the northeast corner of Parque Central, in the Hedman Alas bus terminal and in the shopping malls.

Downtown post office ( 237-8453; cnr Av Miguel Paz Barahona & Calle El Telégrafo; 7:30am-5pm Mon-Fri, 8am-1pm Sat) Mailboxes, Etc ( 235-9750; Blvr Morazán 2301; 8am-6pm Mon-Fri, 9am-1pm Sat) Has Federal Express, UPS and DHL for international deliveries and Viana for domestic. Telephone Most internet cafes have much cheaper rates for international calls than Hondutel. Hondutel ( 222-1120; cnr Av Cristóbal Colón & Calle El Telégrafo; 7:30am-9pm Mon-Sat) Pricey state-run call center. Tourist Information Amitigra ( 231-3641; www.amitigra.org; 2a Calle Nunciatura Apostolica 210, Colonia Palmira; 8am-noon & 1-5pm Mon-Fri) Manages, and has information on, Parque Nacional La Tigra. Corporación Hondureña de Desarrollo Forestal (Cohdefor; 223-4346; Colonia El Carrizal; 7:30am-3:30pm Mon-Fri) The national office; you can get information on Honduras’ national parks, wildlife refuges and other protected areas.


pages: 130 words: 11,880

Optimization Methods in Finance by Gerard Cornuejols, Reha Tutuncu

asset allocation, call centre, constrained optimization, correlation coefficient, diversification, financial engineering, finite state, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, index fund, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, passive investing, Sharpe ratio, transaction costs, value at risk

As we mentioned, these pure steps may be of poor quality in that they point toward the exterior of the feasible region. Instead, following the strategy we discussed in the previous paragraphs, most interior-point methods take a step toward points on the central path C corresponding to predetermined value of τ . Since such directions are aiming for central points, they are called centered directions. Figure 4.5.2 depicts a pure and centered Newton direction from a sample iterate. 4.5. INTERIOR-POINT METHODS 51 Feasible region The Central Path Current iterate centered direction Optimal solution pure Newton direction Figure 4.2: Pure and centered Newton directions A centered direction is obtained by applying Newton update to the following system: AT y − Qx + s − c 0     Ax − b F̂ (x, y, s) =   =  0 .


pages: 138 words: 40,787

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management

Not a lot of people at the time knew where the Internet was going and that it was poised to truly revolutionize the way they did business — and this is the way many view connected devices today. Most businesses recognized that they needed a Web presence — if nothing else, to provide information to their customers and thus cut call-center costs. Companies had a choice of hiring a Web development company or growing the competence in-house within their IT departments. The thing that was fundamentally different, though, was the hardware. By that time there was a significant base of personal computers running Microsoft Windows, thus the hardware risk was minimal.


pages: 163 words: 42,402

Machine Learning for Email by Drew Conway, John Myles White

call centre, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Debian, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, recommendation engine, SpamAssassin, text mining

Canabalt scores Because the mode of the exponential distribution occurs at zero, it’s almost like you had cut off the positive half of a bell to produce the exponential curve. This distribution comes up quite a lot when the most frequent value in your data set is zero and only positive values can ever occur. For example, corporate call centers often find that the length of time between the calls they receive looks like an exponential distribution. Figure 2-24. Exponential distribution As you build up a greater familiarity with data and learn more about the theoretical distributions that statisticians have studied, these distributions will become more familiar to you — especially because the same few distributions come up over and over again.


pages: 141 words: 40,979

The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments by Pat Dorsey

Airbus A320, barriers to entry, book value, business process, call centre, carbon tax, creative destruction, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, intangible asset, John Bogle, knowledge worker, late fees, low cost airline, Network effects, pets.com, price anchoring, risk tolerance, risk/return, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Stewart Brand

Cost advantages can sometimes be durable, but they can also disappear very quickly, so as an investor you need to be able to determine whether a company’s cost advantage is replicable by a competitor. Lots of companies over the past few years have puffed their chests out about how they lowered costs by moving a call center or manufacturing facility to some low-cost region of the world—China, India, the Philippines, you name it. They act as if management’s collective IQ doubled the day some middle manager suggested that the company source low-end parts from a factory with 80 percent lower labor costs. This is not genius, nor is it a sustainable competitive advantage, because those same low-cost resources are very likely available to any company that wants them.


pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

The company also secured a concession from the state to build housing units around a crater lake overlooking the ocean near the northernmost tip of Moroni. Named Jannat al Kamar, or “Paradise in the Comoros,” the project was described by foreign diplomats as the “crown jewel” of Comoro Gulf Holding’s portfolio. Additionally, Kiwan hired SCAS Inc., a consulting firm, to draw up plans for a French call center; a greenhouse and vegetable market; a private 75-bed hospital intended to serve an “increase in tourist arrivals” and “a growing expatriate population due to the surge of business opportunities”; a prepaid electricity exchange; a cable car that would take tourists to the top of the volcano; and a dairy farm, with cows imported from Holland.


pages: 400 words: 124,678

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

If this retention rate begins to drop, however, this might signal that Blackboard’s competitive advantage is eroding. Source #6: Cost Advantages Cost advantages include such factors as economies of scale and advantageous locations. The more structural a cost advantage is, the more sustainable it is. For example, lowering costs by moving a call center to India will help a business, but most of its competitors can narrow this advantage by doing the same. Economies of scale are a more structural kind of advantage. As a business with fixed costs grows, it is able to take advantage of lower per-unit costs. This way, it is able to charge lower prices for its products or services compared to competitors.

You can think about a corporate infrastructure as all the things that are necessary to support the growth of adding new employees, increasing inventory, or building new sites. There are four broad types of corporate infrastructure that support growth: 1. The finance area manages the flow of money through accounting, treasury, tax, and regulatory departments. 2. The operations area controls the sales, distribution systems, call center, ordering systems, manufacturing facilities, legal, communications, policy and planning, administration, project management, and health and safety. For example, if a retail store is having difficulty obtaining inventory, it will contact people within the operations area. 3. Human resources handles recruiting, payroll, and benefits for employees. 4.


pages: 387 words: 119,409

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

In Give and Take, he writes about the power of purpose to improve not just happiness, but also productivity.50 His answer, like many brilliant insights, seems obvious once it’s pointed out. The big surprise is how huge the impact is. Adam looked at paid employees in a university’s fund-raising call center. Their job was to call potential donors and ask for contributions. He divided them into three groups. Group A was the control group, and just did their jobs. Group B read stories from other employees about the personal benefits of the job: learning and money. Group C read stories from scholarship recipients about how the scholarships had changed their lives.

Even this can’t predict performance perfectly, since actual performance also depends on other skills, such as how well you collaborate with others, adapt to uncertainty, and learn. And worse, many jobs don’t have nice, neat pieces of work that you can hand to a candidate. You can (and should) offer a work sample test to someone applying to work in a call center or to do very task-oriented work, but for many jobs there are too many variables involved day-to-day to allow the construction of a representative work sample. All our technical hires, whether in engineering or product management, go through a work sample test of sorts, where they are asked to solve engineering problems during the interview.


pages: 428 words: 126,013

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

After we graduated, Angela explained, she earned a master’s degree, and when she started to apply for jobs, she kept getting a consistent piece of feedback: they said she was overqualified and that if they offered her a place, she would only leave. This dragged on for months. And then a year had passed, and she was still hearing the same thing. Angela was a hard worker, and being out of work was weird for her. In the end, she couldn’t pay her bills, so she applied for shifts at a call center at £8 (around $10) an hour, a little above Britain’s minimum wage at that time. On her first day, she arrived at an old paint-mixing factory in East London. There was a row of plastic-topped desks with skinny legs—the kind you find in British elementary schools—with computers on them, and in the center, at a bigger desk, sat a supervisor.

Index Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, here advertisements benefits of restricting/banning, here people’s claim not to be affected by, here power to create materialistic desires, here, here alertness, heightened, in periods of loneliness, here, here Amish communities, here brutal theology of, here concept of heaven in, here connection to people in, here conscious choice to lead slowed life, here lifestyle of, here low levels of depression in, here as one pole of collectivist-individualist spectrum, here and Rumspringa, here Anda, Robert, here, here animals baboon status hierarchies, here captive, depression in, here, here antidepressants author as evangelist for, here, here, here, here author’s decision to stop taking, here author’s first prescription for, here, here author’s need for increasing doses of, here author’s realization of need for, here debate about role of placebo effect, here lifestyle changes as, here longterm use, unknown effects of, here most-prescribed, here ongoing depression despite, as typical, here, here, here, here specific action of, as unknown, here, here trial-and-error method for choice of, here widespread use of, here See also drug testing of antidepressants; side effects of antidepressants anxiety, and depression, as paired disorders with single origin, here Aspiration Index, here baboon troops status hierarchies in, here stress of low-status members, here Baltimore Bicycle Works cooperative structure of, here founding of, here origin of idea for, here worker satisfaction at, here, here, here Barbour, Allen, here Barrett, Fred, here Beachey, Lauron, here Beecher, Henry, here behavioral treatments for depression importance of supervision in, here See also Bromley-by-Bow Center; social prescribing Behncke, Isabel background of, here depression of, while confined indoors, here, here on depression on captive animals, here, here on disconnection from natural world as cause of depression, here, here mountain climb with author, here, here, here, here, here, here study of bonobos, here Berkman, Lisa, here Berlin, author’s visit to, here See also Kotti neighborhood biological causes of depression, here See also genetic causes of depression; neuroplasticity biophilia, in humans, here bio-psycho-social model of depression, here as currently-accepted model, here limited clinical use of today, here psychiatrists’ focus on biological component of, here bonobos Behncke’s study of, here captive, depression in, here, here brain, physical changes caused by altered environment (neuroplasticity), here, here brain scan, of depressed/anxious person, here Bregman, Rutgers, here, here British civil service, work-related depression in, here Bromley-by-Bow Center (London) development of non-drug treatments for depression, here doctors’ humility at, here holistic approach to diagnosis and treatment, here prescribing of activities rather than drugs, here use of chemical antidepressants at, here Brown, George memories of relative’s suicide, here ongoing research of, here research on environmental causes of depression, here, here impact of, here, here training as anthropologist, here business, hierarchical, as relatively new type, here Cacciatore, Joanne on grief, cultural misunderstanding of, here, here, here on grief as necessary, here, here relationship between grief and depression, here stillborn baby, grief caused by, here as traumatic bereavement specialist, here Cacioppo, John on human need for connection to tribe, here, here, here, here on loneliness vs. being alone, here research on loneliness and depression, here, here, here on snowball effect in depression, here, here on social media and loneliness, here call centers, stressful work in, here Cambodia, community-based approach to depression in, here Carhart-Harris, Robin, here Cash, Hilarie, here Caspi, Avshalom, here Cates, Jim, here, here Celexa, drug testing on, here Cengiz, Nuriye background of, here, here and bonding of Kotti residents, here, here eviction of, here friends made during Kotti protest, here and involvement with others as treatment for depression, here and Kotti neighborhood protest, here, here, here neighbors’ efforts to help, here protests against evictions, here suicide threat by, here, here Chandler, Michael on medicalized view of depression, here research on invisibility of future for depressed persons, here, here, here research on Native American/First Nations suicide rates, here Chasing the Scream (Hari), here, here chemical imbalance model of depression and Age of Prozac, here author as evangelist for, here, here, here, here author’s discovery of, here author’s eventual questioning of, here author’s search for alternative explanation, here, here, here as characteristic of materialistic society, here and confusion of grief with depression, here as confusion of symptom with cause, here, here, here falsity of, here, here, here, here lack of evidence for, here origin of theory, here pharmaceutical industry support for, here, here, here as product of medicalized view of emotions, here, here psychological effects on depressed persons, here, here, here reasons for persistence of, here as standard view of medical community, here, here, here, here triumph over reactive model, here United Nations statement on, here and Western individualism, here See also endogenous model of depression childhood trauma of author, healing effect of discussing, here child’s tendency to blame self for, here health effects of repressing, here as often hidden by victim, here childhood trauma, as cause of depression, here, here, here doctors’ reluctance to accept, here patients’ difficult accepting, here psychological mechanisms of, here research on, here childhood trauma, as cause of obesity, here doctors’ reluctance to accept, here childhood trauma, overcoming in psychedelic drug experiences, here, here, here through acknowledgment of trauma, here Clausen, Matthias, here, here, here Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), as treatment for depression, here Cohen, Sheldon, here confession, healing effects of, here cooperatives as democratic form of business, here, here higher growth in, here human need for connection to tribe and, here, here and incentive to work, here limited research on, here as once-common form of business, here and regaining control over work, here See also Baltimore Bicycle Works Coppen, Alex, here cortisol high blood levels in low-status baboons, here high saliva levels with increased loneliness, here coupsticks, in Crow culture, here Crow nation confinement to reservation, here culture of, here culture, unhealthy, as cause of depression, here, here, here and need for large changes, here, here and undermining of stigma attached to depression, here See also depression, causes of Cunningham, Lisa depression of, here and non-drug treatments for depression, here depression and anxiety, as paired disorders with single origin, here bipolar (manic), biological component of, here bowed-down posture characteristics of, here, here in captive animals, here, here chronic, in author’s childhood and youth, here as form of grief, here, here high incidence in Western cultures, here measurement of, here as once-taboo subject, here, here painfulness of, here as type of submission response, here and unhappiness, continuum between, here depression, causes of author’s reluctance to begin research into, here, here disconnection as common thread in, here limited data on, here non-chemical, as commonly ignored, here See also bio-psycho-social model of depression; childhood trauma; endogenous model of depression; environmental causes of depression; future, hopeful/secure; genetic causes of depression; natural world, disconnection from; neuroplasticity and depression; people, disconnection from; reactive model of depression; status and respect, disconnection from; values, meaningful, disconnection from; work, meaningful, disconnection from derealization, as symptom of depression, here Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and confusion of grief with depression, here and “grief exception,” here symptoms of depression in, here dopamine imbalance of, as cause of depression, lack of evidence for, here, here and Internet addiction, here drug testing as corrupt process, here low threshold for drug approval in, here standard format for, here drug testing of antidepressants as corrupt process, here drug companies’ suppression of unfavorable results, here fundamental problems with, here Kirsch and Sapirstein review of, here, here Kramer’s critiques of, here limited effect shown in, here researchers’ awareness of limited effectiveness, here on side effects, here drug use, widespread, here health effects of, here DSM.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Analysts mine our e-mails for “insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior.”90 D I G I TA L R E P U TAT I O N I N A N E R A O F R U N AW AY D ATA 35 Whatever prerogatives we may have had when we walked in the door, we sign many of them away just filling out the now-standard HR forms.91 Workers routinely surrender the right to object to, or even know about, surveillance.92 “Consent is the universal solvent,” one employment lawyer told me matter-of-factly. Technology makes it easy for firms to record workers’ keystrokes and telephone conversations, and even to translate speech into text and so, predictive analysts claim, distinguish workers from shirkers. Call centers are the ultimate embodiment of the panoptic workspace. There, workers are monitored all the time. Similar software analyzes callers simultaneously, matching them to agents via emotion-parsing algorithms. Sound furious as you talk your way through a phone tree, and you may be routed to someone with anger management training.

Google and Facebook are rarely willing to individualize reputational or copyright disputes. “Automated dispute resolution” at the finance and data barons leaves many out in the cold. Far more don’t even try to engage, given the demoralizing experience of interacting with cyborgish amalgams of drop-down menus, phone trees, and call center staff. There are ways to humanize these processes, via both internal reviews and external appeal rights. My proposals to that end in the previous chapter were not designed to juridify every interaction between company and customer, but to afford persons the dignity of being able to make their case to another person, with a chance at appeal to higher authorities if their complaint was treated in an unreasonable way.30 Due process obligations have sometimes been imposed on private-sector reputation creators, occasionally even to the extent of forcing the exposure of proprietary methods.


Cable Cowboy by Mark Robichaux

AOL-Time Warner, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Bear Stearns, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, corporate raider, cotton gin, estate planning, fear of failure, financial engineering, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, oil rush, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, vertical integration

His strategy sounded terrific, but it was expensive, and his hell-bent pursuit of the interactive, digital future caused costs to suddenly balloon out of control at notoriously lean TCI. Expecting titanic competition from telephone companies and DBS upstarts like DirecTV, Clouston launched a multifront war, pouring $600 million into new licenses for tiny wireless phones, $200 million into national TCI call centers, and vast sums into basic but necessary upgrades of TCI’s aging cable systems. In some ways, TCI was in worse shape than other big cable operators at the time. In the 1980s, TCI bulked up the subscriber count by buying scores of smaller systems. Since then it had neglected to keep pace with the 9486_Robichaux_02.f.qxd 8/28/02 9:54 AM Page 165 C h a s i n g To o M a n y R a b b i t s ?

In retrospect, it was clear that Clouston’s grand plans to transform TCI 9486_Robichaux_02.f.qxd 8/28/02 9:54 AM Page 169 C h a s i n g To o M a n y R a b b i t s ? worked only on paper. TCI’s strategy, while eloquent, could not be executed without piles of money that TCI could ill afford. Clouston was focusing on a point three or four years out in the future, while committing hundreds of millions of dollars near-term. In Clouston’s world, a national TCI call center answered the phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week instead of local TCI offices picking up the phone only from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. He wanted service trucks to respond within a two-hour time frame rather than “one day next week.” He wanted better customer records and easier ways for TCI’s far-f lung offices to report information internally.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

In Part One, we will follow the labor of love as it moves from women’s unpaid work in the home through paid domestic work, teaching, retail work, and the nonprofit sector. Other forms of work that could just as easily have gone into this section include nursing, grocery store work, restaurant work, and call center jobs. It is worth noting that much of this work is the “essential” or “key” work of the coronavirus pandemic: these workers are the people expected to risk their lives to keep going to work in order for the rest of us to survive. In these jobs workers are expected to provide service with a smile or genuine, heartfelt care; they are expected to put themselves second to the feelings and needs of their customers or charges.

The games have titles like “PicksInSpace” and “Dragon Duel,” and the employees can play alone or against one another—the latter bit designed to up the competition factor and perhaps encourage faster picking. One gamification expert explained that the games might “give a bump to workers’ happiness,” but can also be used to ratchet up productivity goals: “It’s like boiling a frog. It may be imperceptible to the user.” Uber has used gamification as well; so have call centers. And it’s being applied both in learn-to-code contexts and in the actual workplaces of software developers. Turn work into a game! What could be more fun? The problem, as artist and author Molly Crabapple acidly predicted years ago, is that “the prize is what used to be called your salary.” 34 The gamifiers are on to something—people hate drudgery, and no one expects to enjoy packing boxes or lifting them for an eight- or ten-hour shift.


pages: 433 words: 129,636

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, British Empire, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, do what you love, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, obamacare, pill mill, TED Talk, zero-sum game

Jose Carlos, it appeared, supplied the Denver drivers with their balloons. There was a slight twist to this operation. This Xalisco cell had its addicts call a Denver number. Those calls were forwarded down to a phone in Nayarit, where an operator answered, then relayed the addict’s order to a driver up in Denver. A heroin call center. This bust was small-time by traditional narcotics standards. Yet, short of arresting the cell owner down in Mexico, the narcotics team, from Denver’s District 3, was doing what probably harmed the Xalisco heroin business model most: raising its cost of business. The Xalisco system succeeded because it reacted to how American cops traditionally worked drugs.

Like Jo Anna’s son, Wayne’s oldest son, Tyler, had also played football. He was a safety for the Division I University of Akron Zips. In 2009, the school opened a thirty-thousand-seat football stadium, a monument to corporate America in sports. The sixty-one-million-dollar InfoCision Stadium, named for a company that operates call centers, also has a field named for the Summa Health System, a nonprofit hospital; club seating named for FirstMerit Corporation; and a press box named for a local credit union. If ever the Division I school needed a good year from its team, 2009 was it. Instead, the team disintegrated under the pressure to win and the weight of pills.


pages: 458 words: 137,960

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Albert Einstein, call centre, dematerialisation, disinformation, escalation ladder, fault tolerance, financial independence, game design, late fees, Neal Stephenson, Pepsi Challenge, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, side project, telemarketer, walking around money, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

I logged out of my own OASIS account and then used my rig to log into a separate OASIS account I’d been issued for work. The log-in process completed and I took control of a Happy Helpdesk avatar, a cookie-cutter Ken doll that I used to take tech-support calls. This avatar appeared inside a huge virtual call center, inside a virtual cubicle, sitting at a virtual desk, in front of a virtual computer, wearing a virtual phone headset. I thought of this place as my own private virtual hell. Helpful Helpdesk Inc. took millions of calls a day, from all over the world. Twenty-four seven, three sixty-five. One angry, befuddled cretin after another.

Why would I take such an idiotic risk to win over someone I’d never actually met? Someone who appeared to have no interest in ever talking to me again? Where was she right now? Did she miss me? I continued to mentally torture myself like that until I finally drifted off to sleep. lOI’s Technical Support call center occupied three entire floors of the headquarters’ eastern I-shaped tower. Each of these floors contained a maze of numbered cubicles. Mine was stuck back in a remote corner, far from any windows. My cubicle was completely empty except for an adjustable office chair bolted to the floor. Several of the cubicles around me were unoccupied, awaiting the arrival of other new indents.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

., The Challenge of Remaining Innovative (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 251. 21Dom Ricci, remarks, X-Cities 3: Heavy Weather—Design and Governance in Rio de Janeiro and Beyond, Columbia University Studio-X, New York, April 10, 2012. 22Noelle Knell, “Detroit Pulls Plug on 311 Call Center,” Government Technology, last modified July 11, 2012, http://www.govtech.com/e-government/Detroit-Pulls-Plug-on-311-Call-Center.html. 23Michael Batty, “A Chronicle of Scientific Planning: The Anglo-American Modeling Experience,” Journal of the American Planning Association 60, no. 1 (1994): 7. 24Michael Batty, telephone interview by author, August 19, 2010. 25Douglass B.


pages: 407 words: 136,138

The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

always be closing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, classic study, David Brooks, full employment, illegal immigration, late fees, low skilled workers, payday loans, profit motive, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, working poor

The only thing missing is a job, and you can provide that.’ ” Employers also have to provide what Ward called “tough love and a nurturing attitude,” that combination of discipline and compassion that makes for good managing as well as good parenting. The approach was forced on Sprint as the economy prospered. Paying $7.45 an hour, the company could no longer attract enough operators to its call centers in the suburbs, where the unemployment rate dropped to 1 percent and the annual turnover rate reached 80 percent. So, to draw workers from mostly black inner-city neighborhoods with double-digit unemployment, Sprint opened a call center with great fanfare in the heart of Kansas City’s historic jazz district, installing cubicles crammed with computer equipment on the third floor of an old brick building at 18th and Vine.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

As they rushed to complete their tasks, they could compete in games with names like MissionRacer, PicksInSpace, and Dragon Duel. The winners got “Swag Bucks” with which to buy Amazon-logo stickers, apparel, or other gear. Despite such uplift and gloss, discontent persisted inside the warehouses and still occasionally made it to public view. In Kentucky, an employee at an Amazon call center asked for a more flexible bathroom-break schedule to accommodate the unpredictable inflammatory bowel condition that came with his Crohn’s disease but was instead accused of stealing time and fired, as he alleged in a lawsuit. (“Associates are allowed to use the toilet whenever needed,” Amazon said later.)

among those deemed out of bounds: The author participated in one tour with one of his sons on July 23, 2019. video-game contests: Greg Bensinger, “‘MissionRacer’: How Amazon Turned the Tedium of Warehouse Work into a Game,” The Washington Post, May 21, 2019. In Kentucky, an employee at an Amazon call center: Benjamin Romano, “Fired Amazon Employee with Crohn’s Disease Files Lawsuit over Lack of Bathroom Access,” The Seattle Times, February 2, 2019. “Associates are allowed to use the toilet whenever needed”: From Amazon’s written response to questions submitted by the author, July 13, 2020. a group of Somali American workers: Jessica Bruder, “Meet the Immigrants Who Took On Amazon,” Wired, November 12, 2019.


pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

But by 2018 the rules resembled the instructions for running a nuclear reactor, if every page had been written by a different author, each blind to how theirs fit into the whole. They ran more than 1,400 pages (probably much more, when accounting for region-specific files to which Jacob’s team did not have access). And yet Jacob and his coworkers, most of them former call-center operators, were expected to know and employ those rules to make hundreds of high-stakes decisions every day. His office, staffed by a few dozen people who reviewed content in a handful of languages and regions, was one of many like it scattered around the globe. A vast archipelago of thousands of moderators across dozens of offices, sharing little communication or coordination beyond what came down from Facebook’s faraway headquarters.

Facebook also claimed that moderators had access to mental-health services. It was a response to reports of moderators developing post-traumatic stress disorder from repeatedly encountering gore and vile pornography. But this had never materialized in his office, Jacob said. Many workers lasted only a few months before burning out, often returning to call-center jobs. It was a sign of the disconnect between Facebook and its agencies, whose incentives are purely to keep costs down and productivity up. The more I learned about how Facebook oversaw those contractors, the less surprising it was that hate overran one country after another unchecked. Moderators are regularly audited for “accuracy,” Facebook’s measure for how often they decide on content the way that the company wishes them to.


pages: 186 words: 49,251

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow

Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, David Heinemeier Hansson, discounted cash flows, Hacker Conference 1984, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Network effects, passive income, rolodex, Salesforce, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, time value of money, zero-sum game, Zipcar

If your customers deal with you in person, you might consider setting up a dedicated reception area similar to the way Home Depot gives contractors their own service counter or your local bank offers business customers a special teller window. If your customers interact with you over the phone, you can set up a dedicated call center for your subscribers or a special number for subscribers to call. You could also use a “follow the sun” strategy in which you set up service employees based in different time zones so there is always someone available to speak live with a customer, no matter what time of the day or night they call.


pages: 179 words: 49,805

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

4chan, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, COVID-19, gentrification, imposter syndrome, Snapchat, telemarketer

Also, I was very chill that one time when I was instructed to get in the car of the owner, was driven by the owner to an unknown location, and waited with the car idling in the red zone when he went to a party. Bonus skill: distracting the health inspector while someone closed the doors that led to a secret and unpermitted second kitchen. Telemarketer for Nonprofit Theaters Some call center, the name of which I’ve blocked out of my memory because it was a very sad place January 2009–May 2009 I called people who saw The Nutcracker at the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre once in 1996 to ask if they were interested in purchasing a full subscription that year. The one instance in which someone was actually interested, I talked her out of the sale because she revealed she was broke and her daughter had cancer.


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

Eventually, the convergence, or at least the reduction, of risk-adjusted spreads of costs among competitors of internationally traded goods— manufactures and commodities—will diminish the effectiveness of exportoriented growth strategies. And while service-export-oriented growth policies are very visible—for example, India exporting call-center and computer services to the United States, the process known in the United States as outsourcing—such markets are still very small. One impediment to ever-rising export shares of China and the Tigers is their rising costs of production. In one of the great ironies of the postwar years, Vietnam is now being sought as the next production platform for expanding market-based—read capitalist—trade.

Of course, Indian exporters still have to contend with red tape at home, but for them property-rights protection and price and cost determination are now largely beyond the bureaucracy's reach. + The liberalizations of Singh, combined with the fall in global communications costs, educated Indians' English-language skills, and low wages, propelled India into the forefront of internationally outsourced business services: call centers, software engineering, insurance claim processing, mortgage lending, accounting, X-ray scan evaluations, and an ever-widening spread of Internet-based services. Indian software engineers helped the world rise to the Y2K challenge. The image of India as a major provider of outsourcing was particularly evident to Americans, who exaggeratedly viewed India as cutting a wide swath through skilled U.S. white-collar jobs.

They have suppressed the prices of competing U.S.-made goods and contained the wages of the workers who produce them—as well as the wages of any who compete against the workers who produce the goods that vie with the Chinese imports. § Accordingly, T h e s e rates are as measured by t h e consumer price index. t i n India, while call centers and a burgeoning high-tech industry garner headlines, t h e vast bulk of e m p l o y m e n t remains rural. I expect t h e rate of migration from t h e rural areas to cities that p r o d u c e exportable goods and services to rise, b u t t h e n u m b e r s do n o t yet seem large. ^Export prices reported by China, which have been rising, appear to reflect a significant change in t h e composition of exports toward higher-pried goods.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Not every caller is satisfied with the ability of these virtual agents to get the job done, but most systems provide a means to get a human on the line. Companies using these systems report that they reduce the need for human service agents up to 80 percent. Aside from the money saved, reducing the size of call centers has a management benefit. Call-center jobs have very high turnover rates because of low job satisfaction. It's said that men are loath to ask others for directions, but car vendors are betting that both male and female drivers will be willing to ask their own car for help in getting to their destination. In 2005 the Acura RL and Honda Odyssey will be offering a system from IBM that allows users to converse with their cars.208 Driving directions will include street names (for example, "turn left on Main Street, then right on Second Avenue").

Although destructive self-replicating software entities do cause damage from time to time, the injury is but a small fraction of the benefit we receive from the computers and communication links that harbor them. One might counter that computer viruses do not have the lethal potential of biological viruses or of destructive nanotechnology. This is not always the case; we rely on software to operate our 911 call centers, monitor patients in critical-care units, fly and land airplanes, guide intelligent weapons in our military campaigns, handle our financial transactions, operate our municipal utilities, and many other mission-critical tasks. To the extent that software viruses do not yet pose a lethal danger, however, this observation only strengthens my argument.


pages: 190 words: 53,970

Eastern standard tribe by Cory Doctorow

airport security, call centre, forensic accounting, high net worth, machine readable, moral panic, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, pirate software, Silicon Valley, the payments system

"They've gone away," he announced, prideful. "Did you get that exchange? There were three of them and they've gone away." From the comm came a tight, efficient voice, a male emergency operator. The speech was accented, and it took a moment to place it. Then Art remembered that the overnight emergency call-centers had been outsourced by the English government to low-cost cube-farms in Manila. "Yes, Mr. Berry." His comm had already transmitted his name, immigration status and location, creating a degree of customization more typical of fast-food delivery than governmental bureaucracies. That was bad, Art thought, professionally.


pages: 155 words: 51,258

Bike Snob by BikeSnobNYC

book value, call centre, car-free, fixed-gear, gentrification, Kickstarter, messenger bag, safety bicycle, urban sprawl

Hearing the crash can give you that extra fraction of a second to take evasive action before you get caught up in it. Observe the Rules I’m not one for mindlessly following rules. Don’t use your cell phone in the movies?!? What-ever. If I need to conduct urgent credit card—related business with a Bangladeshi call center at the top of my voice during a tender love scene, I’m going to do it! Otherwise it could cut into my riding time. However, traffic-related rules need to be taken a bit more seriously. I’m not saying you need to obey all of them, but if you’re interested in crash avoidance you should at least be aware of them.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

On certain matters they are open to conservative blandishments; on economic issues, however, they are pretty far to the left. They don’t admire free trade or balanced budgets or entitlement reform—the signature issues of neoliberal centrism—they hate those things. And if Democrats want to reach them, they will have to turn away from the so-called center and back to the economic left. There are some indications that Democratic politicans have finally understood this. Elizabeth Warren’s star is on the rise. Bernie Sanders is touring the country and reminding people that class politics are back whether we like it or not. * * * But the media and political establishments, I suspect, will have none of it.


pages: 222 words: 54,506

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt

Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, deal flow, drop ship, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Free Software Foundation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

But the most important thing about Zappos, and the secret of its success, was its culture. It focused on exemplary customer service and extraordinary treatment of employees. It shipped products to customers for free (even paying return postage if customers decided to send them back), had a one-year return policy, and provided a customer-service call center open twenty-four hours a day. It also paid 100 percent of employees’ health care premiums. How could Bezos resist a company with such ideals and ambitions ? In 2005, he visited CEO Tony Hsieh at Zappos headquarters in Henderson, Nevada, to discuss buying the company. Hsieh turned him down, worried that being absorbed into Amazon would destroy the unique Zappos culture.


pages: 175 words: 54,755

Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving by Jason Torchinsky

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, interchangeable parts, job automation, Philippa Foot, ransomware, self-driving car, sensor fusion, side project, Tesla Model S, trolley problem, urban sprawl

Then, the remote driver would pilot the car to its GPS-set destination, or until the autonomous system determined it was able to resume control. The remote driver’s actions would be logged and incorporated into the autonomous system’s machine-learning systems, in the hopes of making the autonomous system even better. A decent-sized call center could likely provide on-call support to a large number of semiautonomous cars, although I admit I haven’t done the math, since pretty much every number would be speculative. There’s also something to be said for the possibility of job creation, which would help counter some of the fears that increased autonomy in cars would lead to job loss.


pages: 562 words: 146,544

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Berlin Wall, Burning Man, call centre, digital map, disruptive innovation, double helix, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, high net worth, invisible hand, McMansion, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, RFID, satellite internet, SQL injection, Stewart Brand, tech worker, telemarketer, web application

Just type in the text, and the system would read it out loud over the phone. Maybe that’s what the techs had hooked up to mess with him. He’d play along for now. He looked at the screen. If these sales were real, he would be more than happy to play along. “This entire facility is run by databases, Mr. Moze-ly. Not just the call center. The doors, the lights, the accounting, the prison rosters—it is all handled by database software. Do you understand?” He tried to contain his irritation. “Yes.” “I will prove my power to you; you have only to consent.” There was a pause. “Do you want me to release you from this place?” It was a trap, of course.

“You were commanded to stay out of this place.” It was like a ghost. But it was a computer voice, wasn’t it? He could just get a hint of artificiality in it. British. Leland had a sophisticated voice response system on their customer service phone lines. Lindhurst had demonstrated it to the board last year. It reduced call center costs by 90 percent—it was cheaper than India. But it didn’t speak in midair. This was just a trick. Vanowen was getting his wits back. And his anger. This prank was way out of line. “Lindhurst! Get me Lindhurst, goddamnit!” Vanowen’s voice echoed. “I will not be treated this way!” “QUIET!” The word was so loud it ripped the fabric of the air around him.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Indeed, it is French and American advisers who, as early as the French colonial administration in the 1920s, have urged the Moroccan government to preserve the charming mystique of its medinas rather than allowing them to degenerate like other unregulated shantytowns—ultimately ensuring that tourist interest and revenue grows.12 Even as oil and gas constitute 97 percent of Algeria’s exports (increasingly via undersea pipelines to Europe), the EU is pressuring it to spend its energy revenues on infrastructure and agriculture. In Tunisia, French call centers employ thousands of otherwise listless university graduates. As per capita income gradually rises, Maghreb emigration could slow substantially, simultaneously addressing Europe’s migration issue and the region’s development problems. Greater European investment in the Maghreb means economic transition before political transformation—but in the Arab context, the former must come before the latter.

Beijing’s airport was built with Japanese aid, and Japanese investment in China has never been higher than during times of tension between them. Japan’s imports from China have skyrocketed, including half of its annual fruit consumption. Over one hundred thousand Japanese now live in Shanghai, many facilitating the over $30 billion in Japanese investment as well as working in Japanese call centers.3 Japan remains a global economic powerhouse and the world’s largest provider of humanitarian aid, and its alliance with the United States, its high-tech navy, and its missile-defense program together allow for a very small defense budget that has provided enough security to satisfy this most humble of great powers.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

This idea has already been implemented by some customer-services departments, such as those pioneered by the Chicago-based Mattersight Corporation. Mattersight publishes its wares with the following advert: ‘Have you ever spoken with someone and felt as though you just clicked? The magical feeling you get is the result of a personality connection. Mattersight creates that feeling every day, in call centers around the world.’11 When you call customer services with a request or complaint, it usually takes a few seconds to route your call to a representative. In Mattersight systems, your call is routed by a clever algorithm. You first state the reason for your call. The algorithm listens to your request, analyses the words you have chosen and your tone of voice, and deduces not only your present emotional state but also your personality type – whether you are introverted, extroverted, rebellious or dependent.

Steiner, Automate This, 146–62; Ian Steadman, ‘IBM’s Watson Is Better at Diagnosing Cancer than Human Doctors’, Wired, 11 February 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-medical-doctor; ‘Watson Is Helping Doctors Fight Cancer’, IBM, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/watson_in_healthcare.shtml; Vinod Khosla, ‘Technology Will Replace 80 per cent of What Doctors Do’, Fortune, 4 December 2012, accessed 22 December 2014, http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/12/04/technology-doctors-khosla; Ezra Klein, ‘How Robots Will Replace Doctors’, Washington Post, 10 January 2011, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/how-robots-will-replace-doctors/2011/08/25/gIQASA17AL_blog.html. 9. Tzezana, The Guide to the Future, 62–4. 10. Steiner, Automate This, 155. 11. http://www.mattersight.com. 12. Steiner, Automate This, 178–82; Dormehl, The Formula, 21–4; Shana Lebowitz, ‘Every Time You Dial into These Call Centers, Your Personality Is Being Silently Assessed’, Business Insider, 3 September 2015, retrieved 31 January 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mattersight-uses-personality-science-2015-9. 13. Rebecca Morelle, ‘Google Machine Learns to Master Video Games’, BBC, 25 February 2015, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31623427; Elizabeth Lopatto, ‘Google’s AI Can Learn to Play Video Games’, The Verge, 25 February 2015, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/25/8108399/google-ai-deepmind-video-games; Volodymyr Mnih et al., ‘Human-Level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning’, Nature, 26 February 2015, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/full/nature14236.html. 14.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

For example, Synaptics’ vision chip is fundamentally a copy of the neural organization, implemented in silicon of course, of not only the human retina, but the early stages of mammalian visual processing. It has captured the essence of the algorithm of early mammalian visual processing, an algorithm called center surround filtering. It is not a particularly complicated chip, yet it realistically captures the essence of the initial stages of human vision. There is a popular conceit among observers, both informed and uninformed, that such a reverse engineering project is infeasible. Hofstadter worries that “our brains may be too weak to understand themselves.”20 But that is not what we are finding.

The sex partner can be a real or simulated person. Virtual tactile environment A virtual reality system that allows the user to experience a realistic and all-encompassing tactile environment. Vision chip A silicon emulation of the human retina that captures the algorithm of early mammalian visual processing, an algorithm called center surround filtering. World Wide Web (WWW) A highly distributed (not centralized) communications network allowing individuals and organizations around the world to communicate with one another. Communication includes the sharing of text, images, sounds, video, software, and other forms of information.


pages: 478 words: 149,810

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

These included 7chan, a popular image board for ex-/b/ users; GUROchan, an image board whose posts mainly consisted of gore; and Renchan, a now-defunct site whose content bordered on pedophilia. 4chan needed to gather at least a thousand people, said one /b/ user on the still-developing Scientology thread that day, and who knew, they could probably find at least five thousand willing to fight for the cause. People quickly got down to business. One /b/tard suggested “Phase one”: prank-calling the Dianetics hotline and rickrolling them, or asking the call center “why there’s a volcano on the cover of Dianetics…generally bug the hell out of them.” Another /b/tard instructed everyone to DDoS a list of Scientology sites. You could do this by simply visiting Gigaloader.com and inputting a list of URLs that pointed to eight images on Scientology.org. The Gigaloader site (now defunct) was originally meant to stress-test a server, but from as early as 2007 people figured out they could exploit it for DDoS-style attacks.

fire 30000 SYN 50 296.2.2.8 A SYN was a type of packet, and this meant flooding PayPal.com with thirty thousand bots at fifty packets each for thirty seconds. The type of packet was important because simply flooding a server with traffic wasn’t always enough to take it offline. If you think of a server like a call center manned by hundreds of people, sending “ping” packets was like calling them all and simply saying “Hello” before hanging up. But sending “SYN” packets was like calling all the workers and staying on the line saying nothing, leaving the other end repeatedly saying “Hello?” The process sent thousands of requests, which the server could not ignore, then left it hanging.


pages: 285 words: 58,517

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

The rise of network orchestration as a business model for financial services has led to great opportunities for customer self-service, peer-to-peer interaction, and collective collaboration. Whereas old banks were focused on having skilled employees serve their customers—often using brick-and-mortar retail outlets, ATMs, or call centers—innovative financial service providers now allow customers and investors to serve, save, and invest for themselves via the digital platforms (such as Wealthfront, a personalized investment management app; or Charles Schwab’s Intelligent Portfolio service) to meet our individual needs. As a result, well-established banks and financial services firms are facing a gargantuan question.


pages: 205 words: 58,054

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth S. Anderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, declining real wages, deskilling, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, means of production, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen

He could start by reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s reporting on what it is like to work as a low-wage worker in a restaurant, elder care facility, and in retail.17 Half of all U.S. workers make less than $29,000 annually.18 I’m guessing that’s about one-tenth of Cowen’s income. Has he bothered to check what working conditions are like for workers in the bottom half, who toil in agriculture, slaughterhouses, janitorial services, restaurant work, warehouses, call centers, retail sales, domestic service, elder care, the garment industry, prisons, yard work, and unskilled construction and manufacturing work? Aggregate statistics are hard to come by, because complaints about employer abuse and oppressive working conditions are so diverse, and cross-industry surveys on qualitative issues are expensive and rare.


pages: 182 words: 56,961

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbus A320, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, index card, John Snow's cholera map, megacity, RAND corporation, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche

In other words, to handle this complex situation, they did not issue instructions. Conditions were too unpredictable and constantly changing. They worked on making sure people talked. Wal-Mart’s emergency operations team even included a member of the Red Cross. (The federal government declined Wal-Mart’s invitation to participate.) The team also opened a twenty-four-hour call center for employees, which started with eight operators but rapidly expanded to eighty to cope with the load. Along the way, the team discovered that, given common goals to do what they could to help and to coordinate with one another, Wal-Mart’s employees were able to fashion some extraordinary solutions.


pages: 227 words: 62,177

Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probability and Statistics on Everything You Do by Kaiser Fung

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrew Wiles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, business cycle, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, edge city, Emanuel Derman, facts on the ground, financial engineering, fixed income, Gary Taubes, John Snow's cholera map, low interest rates, moral hazard, p-value, pattern recognition, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, statistical model, the scientific method, traveling salesman

Slow Merges The study of waiting has a distinguished history in mathematics and in the discipline of operations research, under the name queuing theory. Related research at business schools tends to focus on the evaluation and optimization of real-world queuing systems in places such as banks, call centers, and supermarkets. Much of this research focuses on analyzing long-run average behavior. Professor Dick Larson at MIT was an early voice in shifting attention from averages to the variability of wait times, as well as the psychology of waiting. His opinion pieces in Technology Review and MIT Sloan Management Review are worth seeking out.


pages: 197 words: 59,946

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Golden age of television, hiring and firing, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, new economy, pre–internet, Skype, social software, Tony Hsieh

And if you wanted to speak to a company about their product or service, you could press 1 to spell your name, press 2 to place an order, press 3 for more options, or press the star key to return to the main menu. As the 1980s rolled into the 1990s and companies relied increasingly on automated call centers, we were ushered into a customer service dark ages. People griped and moaned, but there was nothing they could do. Some even swallowed the company lie that eliminating the unnecessary, time-consuming, expensive perks that customers used to take for granted—such as the privilege of speaking to a live human being—made it possible to keep prices down.


pages: 261 words: 10,785

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Just as clunky drive-through banks were eventually made obsolete by ATMs, so many jobs that are currently being offshored will, in the future, end up being fully automated. This trend was already discernable in 2004, when an article in InformationWeek pointed out that “low-wage foreign labor may pose a threat to American call-center workers, but their counterparts in countries such as India and the Philippines themselves face being replaced by increasingly sophisticated voice-automation technology.”19 This is one of the reasons that I did not include offshoring in our tunnel simulation. We could have simulated an offshored job as an average light flickering out in one part of the tunnel and then another somewhat dimmer light appearing elsewhere.


pages: 523 words: 61,179

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

In effect, they come up with their own organization, codes of conduct, and rules of governing, she writes.18 FUSION SKILL #7: Reciprocal Apprenticing Definition: (1) Performing tasks alongside AI agents so they can learn new skills; (2) on-the-job training for people so they can work well within AI-enhanced processes. IPsoft’s natural-language AI assistant called Amelia tackles roles as diverse as IT help-desk agent, mortgage broker, and expert question-answerer for a British town council’s website and call center. How can a single software program do so much? Human experts train Amelia, both explicitly and implicitly, how to do its jobs. Only through apprenticing can AI like Amelia or Microsoft’s Cortana succeed in so many different contexts; future work will require a keen understanding of the dynamics inherent in human-machine apprenticeships.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Some people work in jobs that directly service the local community, and those jobs are directly affected by population growth or decline. But many jobs produce goods and services that are consumed elsewhere. Automobile plants in Detroit, or fruit farms in California, or garment factories in El Salvador, or call centers in Bangalore, depend on global, not local, markets. As has become painfully obvious in recent decades, businesses that service a global market don’t generally have a strong commitment to the local community. A factory may provide jobs in Detroit for a decade, or a century, and then close and move elsewhere for reasons that have nothing to do with the size of the population in Detroit.


pages: 190 words: 59,892

How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents by Jimmy O. Yang

call centre, do what you love, Erlich Bachman, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Jian Yang, Peter Gregory, Richard Hendricks, Silicon Valley, Uber for X, Vanguard fund

Garfunkel & Oates 59. 10/22/2012 God’s Not Dead Lead, Speak Chinese, Accent 60. 10/31/2012 Nike Speak Mandarin, riding a bike (hip) 61. 11/6/2012 McDonald’s Guy eating chicken nuggets 62. 11/7/2012 Full House 2 Plays violin, full concert attire 63. 11/15/2012 Need for Speed Supporting, Computer whiz, friendly, sincere 64. 1/5/2013 McDonald’s Sports Fan 65. 1/14/2013 Apple Voice of Siri, in Mandarin 66. 1/16/2013 Larry Gaye 3 lines, lab tech 67. 1/24/2013 America’s Got Talent Private audish, 90 sec standup 68. 1/28/2013 Castle stoner PO Box guy, 4 lines 69. 1/29/2013 Happy Endings 2 lines, nice hair guy 70. 1/30/2013 Verizon Proud son, a lot of dialogue 71. 2/11/2013 Good Luck Charlie Nerd, chess club 72. 2/20/2013 The Mindy Project Asian Video Game addict 73. 2/22/2013 Revenge of Green Dragons Movie, Chinese Gangster 74. 2/27/2013 Chilli’s Buddy/Neighbor 75. 2/27/2013 Deep Tech Computer Programmer 76. 3/8/2013 Infamous 3 VO Video Game, Chinese Pedestrian 77. 4/10/2013 The Gateway Asian nephew, soft but wanna-be gangster type 78. 4/12/2013 Verizon Hipster intern 79. 5/8/2013 Always Sunny Lab tech, Chinese accent, Mandarin, guest star 80. 6/5/2013 Me Him Her Weird Korean Jogger guy 81. 6/5/2013 The Walking Dead Jack, stoner, teenager, meets his girl 82. 6/28/2013 Hello Ladies Camera Guy/ Ronnie, wangster street guy 83. 7/2/2013 Scion Hipster guy 84. 7/11/2013 Wayward Pines Assistant secret service agent, eager, comic relief 85. 7/18/2013 Two and a Half Men Seeking a job as assistant to Walden Schmidt 86. 7/22/2013 Shlub Life Punk ass high school kid 87. 7/27/2013 Subway sandwich artist 88. 7/29/2013 NBC Sketch Pilot Sketch, characters 89. 7/30/2013 Alexander and the Terrible… 2 lines, Young Asian tech boss 90. 8/22/2013 Lenovo Rock band member 91. 8/22/2013 Wonder Years Older teen boy 92. 8/27/2013 Agents of SHIELD Chinese teenager 93. 8/30/2013 Sean Saves the World 2 lines, IT call center, all ethnicity 94. 9/10/2013 NBC Scene Showcase 2 different scenes from comedy shows 95. 9/24/2013 Brooklyn Nine-Nine Korean Hacker guy, early 20s with British accent 96. 10/15/2013 Coca-Cola Authentic Asian family. Mom and Dad came too. Awesome 97. 10/18/2013 Hawaii Five-O young Asian/Hawaiian Thug 98. 10/18/2013 Mixology Fun party guy 99. 10/21/2013 Hot in Cleveland uptight lawyer guy, giving a restraining order 100. 10/22/2013 Mappers Asian high schooler 101. 10/25/2013 The Rebels 2 lines, High school kid For my 102nd audition, I got another email from Jeanne McCarthy’s casting office.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

The adversarial relationship between bosses and workers that capitalism creates is no accident of markets merely introducing transaction costs that are best avoided through planning. Yet for mainstream economists, the confrontation between workers and managers only comes up in the context of “shirking.” The GPS device in the UPS driver’s truck, the call center badge that monitors washroom breaks or the white-collar worker’s app that tracks web browsing history are the sticks requiring one does as one is told; the bonuses are the carrots. Shirking, however, is a very rational response for someone who has little or no say over their work, often has no deeper sense of collective responsibility and knows that the profit from what they do ends up in someone else’s pocket.


pages: 207 words: 63,071

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

With this breakthrough insight, I got excited, and as I do with all my ideas—no matter how half-baked—started writing about it in a Word document kept on my computer. Over the next few weeks I studied companies that specialized in helping private businesses manage customer service. Companies mostly outsourced customer service. Some companies outsourced customer support call centers (India!), some outsourced the writing of response letters, and still others outsourced the surveying and solicitation of feedback. I looked at all these options and considered the applicability of each to the local government space. In my market research it became clear that local governments were, for the most part, completely ignored by companies targeting the private sector.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

The list of factors impacting on work is a long one, and includes: globalization, automation, digitalization, artificial intelligence, workforce aging, skilled labor shortages, job mobility, open collaboration, outsourcing, transparency, business ethics, educational practices, regulatory changes, fluid networks, resource shortages, climate change, shifts in organizational structures and the impact of more women in the workforce. Dying jobs Shorthand secretary Switchboard operator Receptionist Bookbinder Printer Typist Supermarket cashier Photo processor Tollbooth operator Video store owner Call center operator Data entry clerk Record store manager Fighter pilot Newspaper delivery boy Freight handler Butcher Baker Candlestick maker Translator Unskilled agricultural worker Computer operator Elevator operator Errand boy Mail clerk/post boy Order clerk Train driver Bank teller Travel agent Blacksmith Roof thatcher Cinema projectionist Women at work This last factor is especially significant.


pages: 195 words: 63,455

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

At the time, we analysts drew each slide on paper and handed the sheet over to the image processing department, the sole and holy repository of PowerPoint software, graphic computers, and color printers (we reigned over Lotus 1-2-3—which, note to the millennial reader—was not a meditation app). Imagine an immense call center staffed 24/7, but with people transcribing the doodling and bullet points of hundreds of bankers in their heroic yet verbose effort to sell a stock, a bond, a merger transaction—you name it—to a corporate board of directors. A single slide could take hours, and each was slotted in the queue with thousands other slides; it had to be picked up by a designer, processed, and returned to you to proofread.


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

“Most drivers on the freeway are reasonably skilled and willing to cooperate conditionally with fellow drivers, but there is a sizeable minority that imposes substantial costs on other drivers, in the form of accidents, delays, stress, incivility, and rising insurance premiums.” Inspired by the HOW’S MY DRIVING stickers used by commercial fleets, the idea is that drivers, when witnessing an act of dangerous or illegal driving, could phone a call center and lodge a complaint, using mandatory identification numbers posted on every driver’s bumper or license plate. Calls could also be made to reward good drivers. An account would be kept and, at the end of each month, drivers would receive a “bill” tallying the positive or negative comments called in.

For another, given the sheer randomness of driving, the chances are remote that I would ever come across the owner of New Jersey license plate VR347N—more remote even than the chance that they’re reading this book—and, moreover, I’m unlikely to remember that they were the one a Platewire member had tagged for “reading the newspaper” while driving! Lastly, Platewire lacks real consequences beyond the anonymous shame of a small, disparate number of readers. The call-center idea is aimed at countering the feeling of pervasive anonymity in traffic, and all the bad behavior it encourages. But it could also help correct another problem in traffic: the lack of feedback. As discussed earlier, the very mechanics of driving enable us to play spectator to countless acts of subpar driving, while being less aware of our own.


pages: 526 words: 158,913

Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America by Greg Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbus A320, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, Long Term Capital Management, mass affluent, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, yield curve

Instead of working quietly to build their candidacies, open warfare broke out for the top job. O’Neal fought the battle of succession on two fronts. At the business level, he improved the performance numbers at Merrill’s private client unit, cutting expenses and forcing smaller clients to deal with a call center rather than an actual financial advisor. But he wasn’t content to let merit alone determine his success. He formed a small group within the firm, headed by CFO Tom Patrick and supported by Fakahany, to advance his candidacy for the top job in any way possible. Patrick had been with the company for more than two decades, since Merrill’s acquisition of the investment bank White Weld in 1978.

Besides, he believed the private client business was a middling performer that would never match the profitability of the sales and trading desk, where shrewd bets with large pools of capital generated enormous profits. As head of the unit in 2000, O’Neal fired more than six thousand support staff, closed unproductive offices, and shunted Merrill’s smallest clients—the ones with less than $100,000 in assets with the firm—to call centers in New Jersey, so that the brokers could focus on bigger fish. Although the moves improved the unit’s bottom line, they didn’t endear O’Neal to the thundering herd. From 2004 through early 2007, Merrill’s profits soared, so O’Neal’s critics didn’t have much ammunition to use against him. But in the second half of 2007, when it became apparent that O’Neal had mortgaged the future of the firm for short-term profits in the risky area of subprime products, all the antagonism that had built up over the previous years spilled forth.


pages: 543 words: 157,991

All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, break the buck, buy and hold, call centre, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, the long tail, too big to fail, value at risk, zero-sum game

The glory days are over in this company, so pack up your glory and head elsewhere.” In May, less than five months after the settlement was struck, Ameriquest announced that it was closing all 229 retail branches and eliminating 3,800 jobs, and would henceforth operate through four large regional call centers. “It seemed kind of heartless because they made such a big deal out of team, family, and then, all of a sudden—boom,” says one employee who was laid off. “The way it was done was especially impersonal.” Each department was called into a conference room to hear the news via a conference call—which wasn’t even live, but rather a tape loop that played over and over again.

(Inflated appraisals were one of the most common forms of fraud during the housing bubble.) Upon further digging, he discovered that the owner of the outside firm was the wife of one of Ameriquest’s employees. And while Ameriquest was supposed to install a new system that ferreted out appraisal fraud in its four new call centers, this person says that the company made a decision not to install it in its Sacramento office. By late 2006 Ameriquest was searching for a buyer, and by early 2007 ACC was running low on cash. Then came a revealing moment, one that gave a glimpse into just how clever Roland Arnall could be. In 2004, he had invited Deval Patrick—the same Deval Patrick who had led that early Justice Department investigation into the lending practices at Long Beach—to join ACC’s board.


Insight Guides South America (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

Airbnb, anti-communist, Atahualpa, bike sharing, call centre, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, digital nomad, Easter island, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, invention of writing, Kickstarter, land reform, urban planning, urban renewal

Check the security situation beforehand however. Consider attending the horse races at the beautiful Club Hípico. Chilean-style rodeos in the Central Valley are colorful events. Telecommunications Telephones Calls overseas can be made directly from public phones (though only a handful remain) and from call centers. Cellular phone networks run on the 1900 MHz band. Leading companies are Claro, Entel, Movistar, and Wom, and 4G networks are now available in many cities and 5G rollout is incipient. Santiago cafés and many small hotels throughout the country have free wireless internet. Check details before using prepaid cards for internet access via wireless modems.

Year-round surfing and swimming is good on the Tumbes area beaches; elsewhere December–April. Birdwatching is excellent in the Amazon, Colca Canyon, and around Paracas. Telecommunications Local, national, and international calls can be made from public phone boxes. Alternatively, calls can be made from a locutorio (call center), where you pay for the call after you have made it. Celulares (cell/mobile phones) are ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive, and signal coverage is good. Claro and Entel mobile phones work on the 1900 MHz band, Movistar on the 850 and 1700 MHz while Bitel on 1900 and 900 MHz bands. All offer 3G or 4G service, and some are testing out 5G.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

I got my own byline for an article on an extraordinarily large leek grown in someone’s garden, “Bob Grows a Whopper!” I also spent a short period of time trying to sell patio doors, not very successfully, for Castlewood Enterprises, a call center in Bishop Auckland’s Railway Street. Some of the old buildings that used to serve the Stockton-Darlington railway had been converted into cheap office space, and although most of the enterprises on Railway Street went under quickly, call centers flourished for a while in Bishop Auckland—then went to India. Neither of these experiences made a big difference, but they helped me figure out that I wanted to stick with the plan of going to university.


pages: 265 words: 70,788

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss by Ron Adner

ASML, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, call centre, Clayton Christensen, Ford Model T, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, new economy, RAND corporation, RFID, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, vertical integration

Figure 4.6: Value blueprint characterizing Pfizer’s expected path to market for pulmonary insulin in 2005 as the company awaited regulatory approval (excludes pharmacies). The big debate was whether Exubera would be a super blockbuster or just a blockbuster. After the FDA approved Exubera for sale in January 2006, Pfizer made big investments in preparing the market: it developed a rich array of educational materials, set up a twenty-four-hour call center for patient support, and trained 2,300 sales reps in the intricacies of teaching and pitching Exubera to doctors and nurses. By October, the company had reached out to more than 5,000 endocrinologists and diabetologists—its target launch group. And in January 2007, Pfizer launched its “full-court press” to GPs and nurses.


pages: 247 words: 62,845

VoIP Telephony with Asterisk by Unknown

call centre, Debian, framing effect, OSI model, packet switching, telemarketer

If you are using phones from the USA (aside from any power requirements they may have) you should just b able to plug them in Figure: 08-2 TDM400P Wildcard T100P The T100P is a compact and powerful interface card supporting voice an data transmission over T1 andPRI connections. The single-span T1 half-length (available with 2U bracket) PCI card has the same features as the T400P. The low profile, half-length PCI form factor allows this device to fi within a 2U rack mount case or equivalent chassis. This provides excellent density for call center, service provider and other space-sensitive applications. Used with Asterisk, the T100P offers the power to create a seamless network interconnecting traditional telephony systems with the emerging VoIP technologies. The T100P can be used to deliver a wide range ofPBX and IVR services to the network or handset including Voicemail, Call Conferencing, Three-way calling and VoIP Gateways.


pages: 276 words: 64,903

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

When we asked Coester how he scaled his business, he explained that since follow-up calls were the most labor-intensive part of his service, the company had to focus on resolving customer issues the first time around: “We asked, ‘What could someone possibly call about?’ and then reverse-engineered the underlying cause into our platform. Every person’s core functionality has to do with getting the company better.” He then proudly told us, “We used to have twenty people in the call center; now we have five.” At CoesterVMS, everyone is expected to be a problem solver, even when this expectation leads to converting one’s role into something the computer can do, thereby eliminating one’s job. Coester’s choice of the term “core functionality” reveals a perspective some Explorers hold.


pages: 224 words: 64,156

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

India’s economy has been soaring at the same time as China’s, much to the amazement of observers everywhere, but on a model that is significantly different from China’s. As Esther Dyson has pointed out, the Indian economy excels in “nonroutine” services. India, thanks to its citizens’ facility with English, hosts a huge chunk of the world’s call centers, as well as a significant amount of software development, creative production like computer animation, outsourced administrative services, and, increasingly, health care. America in Dreamland Meanwhile, the United States has chosen a different path entirely. While there is a lot of talk about networks and emergence from the top American capitalists and technologists, in truth most of them are hoping to thrive by controlling the network that everyone else is forced to pass through.


pages: 205 words: 20,452

Data Mining in Time Series Databases by Mark Last, Abraham Kandel, Horst Bunke

backpropagation, call centre, computer vision, discrete time, G4S, information retrieval, iterative process, NP-complete, p-value, pattern recognition, random walk, sensor fusion, speech recognition, web application

Given the weights wq , q ∈ S, the weighted generalized median string is simply p̄ = arg min wq · d(p, q). p∈U q=S All the computational procedures discussed before can be modified to handle this extension in a straightforward manner. The generalized median string represents one way of capturing the essential characteristics of a set of strings. There do exist other possibilities. One example is the so-called center string [15] defined by: p∗ = arg min max d(p, q). p∈U q∈S It is important to note that the same term is used in [13] to denote the set median string. Under the two conditions given in Section 3, it is proved in [15] that computing the center string is NP-hard. Another result is given in [7] where the NP-hardness of the center string problem is proved for the special case of a binary alphabet (i.e., Σ = {0, 1}) and the Hamming string distance.


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

Yet the line that separates market segmentation and personalization from discrimination is a fine one. What to do with data-driven insights is increasingly going to be a judgment call that corporate managers will have to make, based on their notions of ethics and self-interest. Take a hypothetical but plausible example: a company’s call-center reports, customer data, and social-media tracking show that single Asian, black, and Hispanic women with urban zip codes are most likely to complain about the quality of products and service. But Asian women whose complaints are resolved become some of your most valuable customers. Should Asians get preferred treatment over black and Hispanic women when resolving complaints?


pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

Then once these big companies established market share, the thinking went, they could start to gently raise their prices and make money off the difference, or margin. The margin ruled everything (and a little planned obsolescence never hurt). It’s difficult to overstate the power that big postwar American corporations had. They organized themselves around strictly delineated product divisions and didn’t have to answer to anyone. There were no call centers, no customer service reps, and, in many cases, no returns, period. This model didn’t work particularly well when it came to customers like our grandparents, but it consistently shipped units and kept boardrooms happy. The emergence of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in the latter half of the century only exacerbated this problem.


pages: 242 words: 71,943

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

We’re conditioned to think otherwise, so let me explain this using an extreme analogy. Pretend there are two cities. The first we’ll call Housing City and the second we’ll call Job City. A thousand people live in Housing City. They each have their own home. Every day, those thousand people travel to Job City where they work in a call center located in a tent in the middle of a field. In a system where municipalities are funded by a property or land tax, Housing City has no jobs, yet it has a thousand homes it can tax and receive revenue from. Job City has at least a thousand jobs, yet the tax base of the tent in the field is relatively tiny by comparison.


Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

The probability of reaching unicorn status calculated for Silicon Valley in recent years turns out to be 1.28%.6 The single point expected value is $1 billion times 1.28% or $12.8 million. No wonder many 22 year olds enter risky entrepreneurial ventures against the odds when their next best alternative could be $50k a year working in a call center! But be careful: Single point expected value calculations are most useful when the underlying distribution is normal rather than skewed or long tailed. You check that by looking at the range, and whether the median and mean of the distribution are very different from each other. When the Australian government research organization CSIRO defended its WiFi intellectual property, it used a simple expected value calculation—but with a difference: It worked backward to the break‐even probability of success, given its estimates of the costs of court action ($10m) and what they would receive if they prevailed ($100m).


pages: 296 words: 66,815

The AI-First Company by Ash Fontana

23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, blockchain, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Charles Babbage, chief data officer, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, independent contractor, industrial robot, inventory management, John Conway, knowledge economy, Kubernetes, Lean Startup, machine readable, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, single source of truth, software as a service, source of truth, speech recognition, the scientific method, transaction costs, vertical integration, yield management

Labeling managers often come from an operations background—that is, a role where they had to coordinate lots of resources, given cost and time constraints. Motivating and managing lower-paid workers could be a requirement where the bulk of labelers on the team are of the nonexpert type. An example of a good background for a labeling manager would be having managed call center operations. Measurement The ultimate goal is a good product, and a good product is based on accurate classifiers. Thus, a key metric should be whether the classifiers are getting more accurate. Quantity has a quality of its own in ML. In other words, a large quantity of labels can increase the accuracy of a classifier even if any one of those labels isn’t necessarily correct.


Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

anti-pattern, business logic, business process, call centre, cognitive load, continuous integration, Conway's law, database schema, DevOps, different worldview, Dunbar number, holacracy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kubernetes, Lean Startup, loose coupling, meta-analysis, microservices, Norbert Wiener, operational security, platform as a service, pull request, remote working, systems thinking, two-pizza team, web application

Effectively, we avoid a Conway’s law effect of “monolithization” in the production environment, which otherwise tends to occur with a single team responsible for supporting all production systems. (2) We also rapidly share knowledge of newly discovered limitations and flaws in the software systems, enabling support teams in each stream to feedback learning quickly into teams building the systems. NOTE Organizations with a need to interact with users directly over the telephone or in person still maintain a call center or service desk, but conceptually, the service desk sits off to one side of the systems (away from the flow of change and flow of information from live systems), allowing information around live-running systems to flow back into the stream-aligned teams. Converting Architecture and Architects The most effective pattern for an architecture team is as a part-time enabling team (if one is needed at all).


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Networking “supported organizations that wanted to divide their labor force geographically,” writes the political economist Joan Greenbaum. And not only geographically: as certain kinds of work were displaced from the corporate core, they were also outsourced. The directly employed customer service representative became a subcontracted call-center operator in another country. In this respect, the internet resembles the shipping container, the simple metal box that revolutionized global logistics in the 1960s and 1970s. The shipping container made it cheaper to transport goods by streamlining and mechanizing what had formerly been a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, and this in turn enabled companies to farm out their manufacturing operations to subcontractors in whatever parts of the world goods could be most cheaply produced.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Even then, when Schulman commissioned a study to ascertain how many of his hourly employees were hard-pressed financially, he figured that few would be. “I was almost positive the response would be, ‘No, we’re not, because you’re paying so well,’” Schulman said. After all, PayPal had pegged its wages to market rates, or even a bit above. And yet two-thirds of workers in the company’s call centers and in other entry-level jobs—more than 10,000 people in all—reported that they were having a rough time paying their bills. “That was such a huge wake-up call for me,” Schulman said. PayPal subsequently lowered the cost of healthcare for its employees by about 60 percent, gave each worker stock in the company, and raised its pay so that everybody would have a living wage in their local market.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

And it wasn’t just the famous software entrepreneurs like Nandan who were engaged. They started it. They showed what was possible. But they were soon followed by the farmers who demanded that schools teach their children more English and the mothers who saved for their kids to have that extra tutoring to get into a local technology college and by the call center kids, who worked the phones at night and hit the business school classrooms by day—sleeping God only knows when in between. It was the revolution of a post-Nehruvian youth bubble that refused to settle anymore for its assigned role or station in life. That is what makes this Indian people’s revolution so powerful and that is what makes it, as Nandan tells us, “irreversible.”

Even as the debate on globalization continues to contribute to the gridlock of our politics, Indians have cast their vote in its favor. Students are going abroad in droves to get the education they cannot get at home. The construction worker is going to the Middle East to make his fortune. The software engineer is busy solving intricate problems for the world’s largest corporations. The young girl in a call center is walking an aggravated customer through a credit card transaction. The gardener of a floriculture company in Bangalore is getting thousands of crimson roses ready for export in time to accompany chocolate boxes and dinner invitations on Valentine’s Day. The Indian entrepreneur is trawling the globe in search of new markets and acquisitions.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Kannan is the cofounder of 24/7 Customer, which began as a call center operation in India and, since 2007, has expanded into a customer service/analytics company with a thousand clients around the world. I have watched his company grow from a start-up in Bangalore, with a lot of people answering phones, into a global big data services firm where high-paid data engineers are working on screens. When I asked him what his clients look like today, Kannan responded: “I go into a client in Sydney and their data expert is sitting in California and they are talking about their call centers in the Philippines and India and their top management is spread around the world—and even those in Sydney [all] come from different countries.


pages: 1,302 words: 289,469

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws by Dafydd Stuttard, Marcus Pinto

business logic, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, database schema, defense in depth, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Firefox, information retrieval, information security, lateral thinking, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, optical character recognition, Ruby on Rails, SQL injection, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application

A more balanced policy, suitable for most security-aware applications, is to suspend accounts for a short period (such as 30 minutes) following a small number of failed login attempts (such as three). This serves to massively slow down any password-guessing attack, while mitigating the risk of denial-of-service attacks and also reducing call center work. ■ If a policy of temporary account suspension is implemented, care should be taken to ensure its effectiveness: ■ To prevent information leakage leading to username enumeration, the application should never indicate that any specific account has been suspended. Rather, it should respond to any series of failed logins, even those using an invalid username, with a message advising that accounts are suspended if multiple failures occur and that the user should try again later (as just discussed)

When this information had been entered correctly, the application forwarded the registration request to back-end systems for processing. An information pack was mailed to the user's registered home address. This pack included instructions for activating her online access via a telephone call to the company's call center and also a one-time password to use when first logging in to the application. The Assumption The application's designers believed that this mechanism provided a robust defense against unauthorized access to the application. The mechanism implemented three layers of protection: ■ A modest amount of personal data was required up front to deter a malicious attacker or mischievous user from attempting to initiate the registration process on other users' behalf

The mechanism implemented three layers of protection: ■ A modest amount of personal data was required up front to deter a malicious attacker or mischievous user from attempting to initiate the registration process on other users' behalf. ■ The process involved transmitting a key secret out-of-band to the customer's registered home address. An attacker would need to have access to the victim's personal mail. ■ The customer was required to telephone the call center and authenticate himself there in the usual way, based on personal information and selected digits from a PIN. This design was indeed robust. The logic flaw lay in the implementation of the mechanism. The developers implementing the registration mechanism needed a way to store the personal data submitted by the user and correlate this with a unique customer identity within the company's database.


pages: 261 words: 71,798

Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself From Harmful People by Joe Navarro, Toni Sciarra Poynter

Bernie Madoff, business climate, call centre, Columbine, delayed gratification, impulse control, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh

I wrote this book to share what I’ve learned from experience through decades of training and study and from talking to victims. I wanted to share this with you because I know that you are not going to have the training I received, nor will you have a police officer or mental health professional constantly at your side to help you. None of us do. There are thousands of suicide call centers around the country, and there are many battered spouse centers. But there’s no center you can call when you have suspicions of a dangerous personality. Just as it’s up to us to “look before we cross,” so it’s up to us, individually and as parents or managers, to be vigilant, to have situational awareness, to assess for threats and danger, to take appropriate action to prevent dangerous individuals from entering our lives, and to deal with them if they do.


pages: 256 words: 15,765

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It now goes without saying that the Internet has enabled every company to tap global markets. Beyond that, virtually all major companies are now multinationals, and it has become increasingly difficult to even say where a company is ‘‘located.’’ But these days, many smaller businesses and even start-ups have some global scope. Manufacturing in China, software programming in India, call centers in the Philippines and Argentina—all are within the reach of even modestly sized businesses. No longer a luxury, leveraging the efficiencies of the flat world has essentially become a business necessity. The United Nations estimates there are over 60,000 multinational corpo- Globizens 163 rations, a figure that has doubled over the past two decades, while the average size of multinationals has dropped dramatically.1 Globalization isn’t just about moving work to where it can be done at the lowest cost; increasingly, it is about getting the best people, bigger teams, and leveraging time-zone differences to enable work to continue 24/7.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

The Arab world has the greatest share of its population in Generation Y, but this cohort is also a generation in waiting: waiting for jobs, education, marriage, and homes. All the reports about a “missing middle class” and “youth bulge” should focus on how to build more vocational centers, factories, and call centers in the Middle East. This is the time for American companies—not its military—to be the tip of the spear. Foreign investment reinforces alliances: Now that the U.S. military has pulled out of Saudi Arabia, it’s increasingly up to multinationals such as Alcoa, which recently announced a $10 billion investment in a new aluminum complex, to bring jobs in modern facilities and goodwill to the Saudi people.


pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

According to the Hackett Group, a business and technology consultancy, companies with revenues of $5 billion and over are expected to take an estimated 350,000 jobs offshore in the next two years alone—nearly half in information technology, and the rest in finance, procurement, and human resources.59 Linda Levine of the Congressional Research Service says that some see “perhaps a total of 3.4 million service sector jobs moving overseas by 2015 in a range of fairly well paid white-collar occupations.”60 And in a 2006 study, consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton found that white-collar outsourcing is no longer just about call center and credit card transactions.61 Now “companies are offshoring high-end work that has traditionally been considered ‘core’ to the business, including chip design, financial and legal research, clinical trials management, and book editing.” Do you hear that? It’s Ross Perot’s giant sucking sound being cranked up to a deafening roar—and it’s about a lot more than NAFTA.


pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It can match a consumer’s individual characteristics (such as past knowledge of technical competence, the type of phone they are calling from, or past calls) to improve its assessment of the question. In the process, it can diminish frustration, but more importantly, it can handle more interactions quickly without the need to spend money on costlier human call-center operators. The humans specialize in the unusual and more difficult questions, while the machine handles the easy ones. As machine prediction improves, it will be increasingly worthwhile to prespecify judgment in many situations. Just as we explain our thinking to other people, we can explain our thinking to machines—in the form of software code.


pages: 266 words: 79,297

Forge Your Future with Open Source by VM (Vicky) Brasseur

AGPL, anti-pattern, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), call centre, continuous integration, Contributor License Agreement, Debian, DevOps, don't repeat yourself, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, FOSDEM, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, information security, Internet Archive, Larry Wall, microservices, Perl 6, premature optimization, pull request, Richard Stallman, risk tolerance, Turing machine

This is important, of course, but it’s not as important as the what. That’s because every team has its own particular preference for the how. Your portfolio may show them that you can create effective technical documentation for multiple audiences, but your resume will show them that your documentation reduced contact to the company call center, saving tens of thousands of dollars in support representative time in the first year alone. Therefore, don’t give in to the trend to replace your resume with a portfolio. By preparing both, you’ll make a strong and positive impact on potential employers. FOSS Benefits to Your Personal Network When you mention the word “networking” to many in software development, often they’ll do one of two things.


pages: 293 words: 78,439

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

You have to be tireless about it, consistent and persistent, and keep battering the core messages home week after week. Your leaders have to as well, and they have to tailor the message so it has the appropriate level of fidelity relevant to each part of the organization. A person working in a call center might need a different set of messages to understand how he docks in to the big picture than a line manager, and so on. Communication is an ongoing challenge, but I try to make it easier by creating a company culture consistent with our vision, including being approachable and available to everyone who works here.”


pages: 258 words: 74,942

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

You don’t get referrals by just meeting the standard expectations of customer service—people rarely find it worth mentioning to others that a company did just enough to help them but nothing more. You have to do much more than that to evangelize customers if you want them to talk about your company favorably. A great example is a now-infamous story from the tech world about a customer service call to RackSpace, an enterprise-level cloud hosting provider. The call center rep heard someone in the background of a support call mention that he was hungry and wonder about ordering something. She quietly put the customer on hold, ordered a pizza to be delivered to the address she had on file, and went back to assisting the customer with his problem. Twenty minutes later, still on the phone with the customer, she heard a knock in the background and told him to go answer the door, saying, “It’s your pizza.”


pages: 204 words: 73,747

This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare by Gabourey Sidibe

call centre, Mark Zuckerberg, Snapchat, telemarketer

At Sundance, my costar Mo’Nique kindly had her hair and makeup artist prepare me for the premiere, but the rest of the time I made myself up even though I had no clue how. I felt like a contest winner—in a bad way. Like I didn’t really belong on the red carpets, but I’d sold the most raffle tickets, so the powers that be were allowing me to feel fancy for a night, but in the morning I’d have to go back to working the phones at the call center . . . or something. When Precious was picked up for distribution by Lionsgate, I’d already won a few awards and was on the verge of being nominated for more. The company hired a stylist to dress me for the rest of the awards season and paid for hair and makeup as well. I finally had a team to make sure I looked presentable the next time I had to stand next to Mariah!


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

(A Web site, deadmalls.com, started by two retail historians, now tracks the “demise of these great giants of retail.”) But because mall construction is so expensive, once the massive structures are built, they’re stuck there. To stem the tide of vacancies, mall developers have been getting creative about finding new tenants, filling them with call centers, art galleries, car showrooms, even farmer’s markets. Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview is now closed on weekends because there are so few visitors, and part of the mall has been converted into a vegetable garden. “I look at it as space,” Vicky Poole, a Galleria executive, told the New York Times.


pages: 260 words: 76,223

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel

3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, behavioural economics, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, vertical integration, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Just ask Tony Hsieh over at Zappos, Richard Branson at Virgin, or Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com. These business leaders (and there are many more) didn’t sell social business through their organizations as a marketing and communications initiative. They sold it through as customer service. We’re not talking about customer service in terms of the call center, we’re talking about the core of customer service: Why are we in business? We are in business to serve the customer. Nothing more. Nothing less. The more we attempt to resist social business models, the more painful these next few years (and decades) will be. We can expect more local, more mobile, and more socially enabled consumers.


pages: 183 words: 17,571

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, disintermediation, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, underbanked, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The re-imagined banking of the 1980s and 1990s became extremely complicated. First, there was a multiplication of products, each with its own management, infrastructure, and strategy. Many of these, such as credit cards and home equity loans, were novel ways to originate consumer credit. Second, there were new distribution channels, such as ATMs, direct mail, call centers, and of course home computers. Eventually, the Internet, mobile telephones, and social media joined the mix. Third, there was a multiplication of specialized software and networks to support these products. Bank systems grew in cost and complexity as IT became a bigger share of banks’ budgets, as did product development and marketing—all things banks spent very little on before the 1980s.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

Handelsbanken sailed through the financial crisis with a model founded on what it calls the “church-tower principle,” the idea that branch managers should do business only as far as they can see from the local spire. Decision making is extremely decentralized; the branches make all the credit decisions, and there are no detailed budget targets for them to meet. Customers do not spend years of their lives waiting in call-center lines; they call up and speak to a person whose name they know. There is no bonus culture, either. If Handelsbanken’s return-on-equity goals are met, then a portion of the profits is funneled into the bank’s pension scheme, which is its largest shareholder. It’s all wonderfully Swedish. But personalized service and relationship banking are also expensive.


pages: 287 words: 80,180

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renée A. Mauborgne

Asian financial crisis, Blue Ocean Strategy, borderless world, call centre, classic study, cloud computing, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, endogenous growth, Ford Model T, haute couture, index fund, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, machine translation, market fundamentalism, NetJets, Network effects, RAND corporation, Salesforce, Skype, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

To hit the cost target, companies have three principal levers. The first involves streamlining operations and introducing cost innovations from manufacturing to distribution. Can the product’s or service’s raw materials be replaced by unconventional, less expensive ones—such as switching from metal to plastic or shifting a call center from the UK to Bangalore? Can high-cost, low-value-added activities in your value chain be significantly eliminated, reduced, or outsourced? Can the physical location of your product or service be shifted from prime real estate locations to lower-cost locations, as The Home Depot, IKEA, and Walmart have done in retail or Southwest Airlines has done by shifting from major to secondary airports?


pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

For particularly difficult cases, we took to the telephone. We didn’t have desk phones, so I gave out my personal mobile number. In a text-based industry, speaking on the phone was surprisingly intimate. Unless the customer was verbally abusive, I liked doing it. Most understood that customer support wasn’t coming from an outsourced call center in the middle of Indiana; it was just coming from me. I would roll a desk chair into the brutally air-conditioned server room, drink tea, and repeat myself until it felt like we had come to an understanding. Sometimes a customer and I opted to video-chat and screen-share, but this felt like too much exposure, too much personhood.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

Google self-driving cars are being tested on California’s Highway 101; Facebook spins out posts based on deep learning of content preferences; Amazon’s Alexa powers lights, TVs, and speakers by voice activation; and Microsoft’s Azure relies on cognitive computing for speech and language applications, while IBM Watson’s AI-based computer system increases productivity and improves customer service for call centers, production lines, and warehouses. In China, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are working on similar technologies and racing with the US tech giants to become world leaders in AI. The Ministry of Science and Technology in China has earmarked specialties for each of these Chinese tech titans in its master plan for AI global dominance: Baidu for autonomous driving, Alibaba for smart-city initiatives, and Tencent for computer vision in medical diagnoses.


pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

If the CEO is hired from outside, the board needs to ask whether the candidate can truly embed in and reinforce the existing corporate culture. The use of third-party providers, such as contractors and consultants, also creates difficulties in managing corporate culture. The presence of a significant number of outside workers running core operations—such as a customer call center supporting a bank or mobile phone company, a courier network attached to a large corporation (think drivers for Uber or delivery agents for FedEx), or engineers subcontracted to a mining company—should raise concerns for boards about how to ensure that the contractors live by the cultural values of the host company.


pages: 244 words: 78,238

Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic by Michael Smith, Jonathan Franklin

airport security, Boeing 747, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Port of Oakland, Snapchat, social distancing, Suez canal 1869

Anne knew the doctors were crushed. So she tried to put it out of her mind. Inside the room, Anne could feel the dry, stale air rushing in. Was the virus entering via the air vent? She headed to reception, trying to keep her distance when she passed someone in the hall, trying not to touch anything. At the improvised call center, the task was overwhelming. There were so many calls, and passengers seemed like they were becoming desperate. The confinement was taking its toll. One grandmotherly-sounding woman began to unravel. “You need to stop this,” she pleaded. “You’re giving us too much food!” Suddenly, another woman grabbed the phone and started banging it on the table while yelling, “Isn’t this annoying?”


pages: 318 words: 73,713

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

In his 1991 Wisconsin high school yearbook, Underwood had vowed to “make a totally obnoxious amount of money at an early age and spend the rest of my life spending it,” according to a Wired magazine investigative article. In 2004, Underwood, then thirty years old, teamed up with a local businessman in Milwaukee, Michael Beaman, to launch Quincy Bioscience. The following year they founded Prevagen. Much of the initial marketing was by phone. Picture a call center full of people contacting long lists of older folks and asking them whether a name or a fact ever seemed to play hide-and-seek. Their pitch would repeat the spiel about jellyfish and the putative powers of their proteins. They would cite cognitive studies (sponsored by the company) and offer a month’s supply for $50 or $60.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

The role of tacit knowledge (that is, know-how that is hard to write down and convey without experience) in a growing proportion of production, and the asymmetries of information pervading many characteristic modern economic activities, mean it is hard to monitor delegated or contracted activities or write legally-enforceable contracts that will cover all eventualities. Although it is easier to monitor the location of an Uber driver or Amazon warehouse worker thanks to digital tracking, or listen in to a call center worker and time their calls, it is almost impossible to monitor the quality of work of a software systems engineer or an accountant while they work and possibly even after they complete it. It is not even clear what the relevant unit of quantity is: is the volume of a software system really the number of lines of code; or an audit of the number of lines in the financial report?


The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling by Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross

active measures, Albert Einstein, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, data acquisition, data science, discrete time, false flag, inventory management, iterative process, job automation, knowledge worker, performance metric, platform as a service, side project, zero-sum game

Recalling the major components of a DW/BI environment from Chapter 1: Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, and Dimensional Modeling Primer, you can envision the model results pushed back to where the relationship is operationally managed (such as the rep, call center, or website), as illustrated in Figure 8.1. The model output can translate into specific proactive or reactive tactics recommended for the next point of customer contact, such as the appropriate next product offer or anti-attrition response. The model results are also retained in the DW/BI environment for subsequent analysis. Figure 8.1 Closed loop analytic CRM. In other situations, information must feed back to the operational website or call center systems on a more real-time basis. In this case, the closed loop is much tighter than Figure 8.1 because it's a matter of collection and storage, and then feedback to the collection system.


pages: 302 words: 83,116

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

(In truth, even a pulse wasn’t necessary: fraudsters were happy to use the identities of dead and fictional people as well.) Horsley learned the customs of various subgroups. West African immigrants were master check washers, while Eastern Europeans were the best identity thieves. Such fraudsters were relentless and creative: they would track down a bank’s call center and linger outside until an employee exited, offering a bribe for customers’ information. Horsley built a team of data analysts and profilers who wrote computer programs that could crawl through the bank’s database and detect fraudulent activity. The programmers were good. The fraudsters were also good, and nimble too, devising new scams as soon as old ones were compromised.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

In 2006, automated calling banks reached two-thirds of voters, and by 2008 robocalls were the favored outreach tool for both Democrats and Republicans. Incapacitating your opponents’ information infrastructure in the hours before an election has become part of the game, though there have been a few criminal convictions of party officials caught working with hackers to attack call centers, political websites, and campaign headquarters. Republican National Committee official James Tobin was sentenced to ten months in prison for hiring hackers to attack Democratic Party phone banks on Election Day in 2002. Partisans continue to regularly launch denial-of-service attacks; attackers consistently target Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) websites, for example.


pages: 262 words: 80,257

The Eureka Factor by John Kounios

active measures, Albert Einstein, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, classic study, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flynn Effect, functional fixedness, Google Hangouts, impulse control, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, William of Occam

Millions use Skype, Google Hangouts, and other Internet services to hold live teleconferences with people all over the world. People watch international television programs and videos on cable, satellite TV, and the Internet. When a consumer in the United States picks up the telephone to call customer service, she may well speak to someone in a call center in India. Physical and financial impediments to long-distance human interaction are thus dissolving. Globalization, it seems, will have an impact on humanity that is deeper than economic or cultural change. It may well be subtly shifting our cognitive style toward insightfulness, potentially slowing what seems to be an overall (U.S.) decline in creativity.


When Free Markets Fail: Saving the Market When It Can't Save Itself (Wiley Corporate F&A) by Scott McCleskey

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, break the buck, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, place-making, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, web of trust

That may sound perfectly reasonable, and may be achievable for a small investment advisory firm. But if you tell Morgan Stanley that they need to do that for each and every one of their customers, you are unlikely to receive a positive response. Similar considerations arise for banks dealing with a large volume of transactions (whether actual banking transactions or even call center operations) or other firms with either a high volume of activity or a large number of customers and counterparties. A second reason has to do with the dynamics of the market. A trade for a very large number of shares will overwhelm and flatten the market, distorting the price for retail and investors alike.


pages: 285 words: 81,743

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Multinationals have set up shop in places like India and Ireland, too. “But we don’t set up our mission critical work in those countries,” an American executive from eBay told us. “Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, eBay . . . the list goes on. The best-kept secret is that we all live and die by the work of our Israeli teams. It’s much more than just outsourcing call centers to India or setting up IT services in Ireland. What we do in Israel is unlike what we do anywhere else in the world.”19 Another commonly cited factor in Israel’s success is the country’s military and defense industry, which has produced successful spin-off companies. This is part of the answer, but it does not explain why other countries that have conscription and large militaries do not see a similar impact on their private sectors.


pages: 278 words: 83,468

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

One of its landmark provisions created a new federal agency, the Consumer Federal Protection Bureau (CFPB). This agency is tasked with protecting American citizens from predatory lending by financial services companies such as credit card companies, student lenders, and payday loan offices. The plan calls for it to accomplish this by setting up a call center where trained case workers will field calls directly from the public. Left to its own devices, a new government agency would probably hire a large staff with a large budget to develop a plan that is expensive and time-consuming. However, the CFPB is considering doing things differently. Despite its $500 million budget and high-profile origins, the CPFB is really a startup.


pages: 302 words: 86,614

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes, Mohamed El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, high-speed rail, impact investing, interest rate derivative, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, NetJets, oil shock, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, two and twenty, zero-sum game

In January 2011, JCP said it would add Ackman and Roth to its board. “We get along well with the other directors and we have made good progress together.” Since Ackman’s stake, the company announced a plan to improve profitability by closing underperforming stores, winding down its catalog and outlet operations, and streamlining its call center and custom decorating business as part of a cost-cutting drive. Maybe it’s his can-do attitude that also convinced the board to welcome him. “When he takes a large stake in a company, Bill does tremendous due diligence and his eyes see things others don’t see,” says friend Mark Axelowitz, managing director of investments of UBS Private Wealth Management, who also serves with Ackman on the Executive Committee at the Boys and Girls Harbor in Harlem.


pages: 389 words: 81,596

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

One day, fate decided I hadn’t chi ku’d enough and dropped a shit bomb. At work, an announcement was made that our department was being “restructured” due to budget cuts (despite the fact that the company had made two billion dollars that year). Familiar faces started disappearing, replaced with unfamiliar ones that more often than not were stationed in an Indian call center. Despite having been a loyal employee for six years and getting promoted twice, I had to submit weekly reports with detailed examples to prove why I shouldn’t immediately be fired, too. All of my colleagues were also hustling to prove why they shouldn’t be on the chopping block. My best friend, as it turns out, didn’t have the proof.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Hence, increasing the stress readings from a bridge by a factor of a thousand boosts the chance that some may be wrong. But you can also increase messiness by combining different types of information from different sources, which don’t always align perfectly. For example, using voice-recognition software to characterize complaints to a call center, and comparing that data with the time it takes operators to handle the calls, may yield an imperfect but useful snapshot of the situation. Messiness can also refer to the inconsistency of formatting, for which the data needs to be “cleaned” before being processed. There are a myriad of ways to refer to IBM, notes the big-data expert DJ Patil, from I.B.M. to T.


pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Suddenly it’s as well served as most other coastlines around the world, with the exception of hot spots like Hong Kong that have ten or twelve cables. But it’s gone from zero to three cables in eighteen months. That makes it part of the global network. Not every customer wants a link from Kenya to London, but once you can do it, and do it consistently and do it well, people begin to think about things like call centers, which are constantly hunting for the place with the lowest cost services. The demand springs up.” Undersea cables link people—in rich nations, first—but the earth itself always stands in the way. To determine the route of an undersea cable requires navigating a maze of economics, geopolitics, and topography.


pages: 324 words: 87,064

Learning Ext Js by Shea Frederick

call centre, Firefox, framing effect, side project, SQL injection, web application

Thorat Copy Editor Sumathi Sridhar Editorial Team Leader Akshara Aware This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Roman Heinrich on 25th December 2008 Am Hilligenbusch 47, , Paderborn, NRW, 33098 About the Authors Shea Frederick began his career in web development before the term 'Web Application' became commonplace. By the late 1990s, he was developing web applications for Tower Records that combined a call center interface with inventory and fulfillment. Since then, Shea has worked as a developer for several companies, building and implementing various commerce solutions, content management systems, and lead tracking programs. Integrating new technologies to make a better application has been a driving point for Shea's work.


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

If China skips a few Treasury auctions, the greenback is primed to slide by 20 to 40 percent. That kind of sharp decline would cause North America’s hollowed-out manufacturing sector to fill back up in a hurry. Globalization ushered in a massive redistribution of income between countries. A huge pool of cheap labor brought companies, ranging from auto plants to call centers, to places such as China and India. The shift was a boon for those countries and the bottom line of multinational corporations, but someone always gets the short end of the stick. In this case, it was North American workers. Not only did they lose their jobs, but their bargaining power also took a hit each time another overseas factory opened.


pages: 339 words: 83,725

Fodor's Madrid and Side Trips by Fodor's

Atahualpa, call centre, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, low cost airline, Pepto Bismol, traffic fines, young professional

Phones The good news is that you can now make a direct-dial telephone call from virtually any point on earth. The bad news? You can’t always do so cheaply. Calling from a hotel is almost always the most expensive option; hotels usually add huge surcharges to all calls, particularly international ones. In some countries you can phone from call centers or even the post office. Calling cards usually keep costs to a minimum, but only if you purchase them locally. And then there are mobile phones, which are sometimes more prevalent—particularly in the developing world—than land- lines; as expensive as mobile phone calls can be, they are still usually a much cheaper option than calling from your hotel.


pages: 308 words: 84,713

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

Predictive algorithms are also assuming more control over the decisions made by business executives. Companies are spending billions of dollars a year on “people analytics” software that automates decisions about hiring, pay, and promotion. Xerox now relies exclusively on computers to choose among applicants for its fifty thousand call-center jobs. Candidates sit at a computer for a half-hour personality test, and the hiring software immediately gives them a score reflecting the likelihood that they’ll perform well, show up for work reliably, and stick with the job. The company extends offers to those with high scores and sends low scorers on their way.42 UPS uses predictive algorithms to chart daily routes for its drivers.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

If an information system can gather this information by itself, store it in a computer-readable form, process it using simple rules or via artificial intelligence algorithms, and respond without human involvement, then the office building and its contents can be replaced by a rack of computer gear. There is no need for people, file cabinets, desks, or more than a few square feet of physical space. As mentioned before, many customer call centers today already fit this description. The physical structure, its contents, and its people are information proxies. The substitional equivalent is a rack of computer gear. A retail store is an information proxy combined with a physical delivery system. When consumers go to Walmart, they engage in a number of information exchange processes.


pages: 274 words: 81,008

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

In a video message sent in mid-December to the firm’s investors, Conway, D’Aniello, and Rubenstein “imagined” what would have happened had they not created Carlyle two decades earlier.1 Rubenstein turns up perched behind a lemonade stand, pitching kids on an opportunity to forego a simple cup in favor of becoming a limited partner in the stand. Conway sits in a telephone call center (a nod to his previous job at MCI), and D’Aniello sells pastries and coffee at Carlyle-owned Dunkin’ Donuts. While investors likely chuckled at the self-directed send-up, they were much more interested in another private message from Carlyle that arrived a few days later. And they got the evidence of why Carlyle was especially feeling its oats at the moment.


The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani

Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social bookmarking, social contagion, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, web application, white picket fence, work culture

He says, “Anyone that’s a principal in a company should wake up every day with so much gratitude for all the people that have said, ‘Hey, I believe in your vision. I believe in your mantras. I believe in your style and your strategy and where you’re going.’ And then they show up and get behind you. We need to honor that.” John’s team was determined to set a new industry standard for the call center business, where the average annual turnover rate is 150 percent. That’s devastating. It means that every year he loses essentially all his staff. And that is the average for his entire industry. So one day he met with his executives at a quarterly meeting to discuss employee engagement. What surfaced was that one of the company’s core values—“We take care of each other”—was not being honored.


pages: 453 words: 79,218

Lonely Planet Best of Hawaii by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, G4S, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, low cost airline, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation

F Health oFor emergency medical assistance anywhere in Hawaii, call %911 or go directly to the emergency room (ER) of the nearest hospital. For nonemergencies, consider an urgent-care center or walk-in medical clinic. oSome insurance policies require you to get preauthorization for medical treatment from a call center before seeking help. Keep all medical receipts and documentation for claims reimbursement later. a Insurance Getting travel insurance to cover theft, loss and medical problems is highly recommended. Some insurance policies do not cover ‘risky’ activities such as scuba diving, trekking and motorcycling, so read the fine print.


pages: 361 words: 86,921

The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (And Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor by Andy Kessler

airport security, Andy Kessler, Bear Stearns, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Dean Kamen, digital divide, El Camino Real, employer provided health coverage, full employment, George Gilder, global rebalancing, Law of Accelerating Returns, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, Network effects, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration

Instead of paying $25,000 for a pleasant teller who would smile while counting out your twenties, you could put four of them outside the bank and run them 24 hours a day, Sundays, too. Working banker’s hours is an old joke. A website can embed travel agents’ knowledge into a series of clicks. Call centers can cost $1 a minute—a travel site is cheaper and better. A diagnostic chip in a car embeds a mechanic’s knowledge of what might go wrong. The plot thickens—while technology squeezes the life out of them, it steals their knowledge and then spits them out. And that’s what’s about to take place in medicine.


pages: 323 words: 95,188

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, call centre, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing

Today these newcomers wield substantial power of their own, and their rise makes the world a very different place from what it was even half a decade ago, let alone in 1989. Since the turn of the millennium, the U.S. share of world GDP has declined from 36 percent to 28 percent; that of China, India, Russia and Brazil has more than doubled to 16 percent. Meanwhile, America’s low-cost industrial base and back-office services shifted to factories in Guangzhou and call centers in Hyderabad. China’s foreign exchange reserves rose from $200 billion in 2001 to $1.8 trillion in 2008; India’s have gone from $50 billion to $300 billion. Thanks to low savings at home, the U.S. government relies more and more on overseas borrowing to finance everything from Social Security and Medicaid to the ongoing war in Iraq.


pages: 310 words: 91,151

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, British Empire, call centre, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, fear of failure, glass ceiling, high net worth, income per capita, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marc Andreessen, microcredit, Own Your Own Home, random walk, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Ballmer

Because the cousins were in Boston and in Maryland, we decided to aim for the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. “Do you think you can get one of them?” I asked. Michele, in her understated but confident manner, informed me that she was confident that she could deliver both. Within three days, the story of the entrepreneurial cousins ran in both newspapers. Now it was their turn to experience life as a call center. Schools up and down the East Coast were ringing to ask if they could place an order for tsunami bands. The request to the manufacturer was upped from 5,000 to 10,000, then 20,000, then 25,000 then 40,000, and still the phone kept ringing. An e-mail address—tsunamibands@aol.com—was set up. This in-box was soon clogged with over 200 messages from as far away as Hawaii and England.


pages: 316 words: 90,165

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

Eventually, most Americans would rely on them—would bet their lives on them. In the late ’90s, however, they would have lost that bet, because there was no sure way of locating a caller. At that time most landline phone systems used digital switching systems that could instantly identify the source of a phone call. Dial 911, and the call center immediately received the caller’s phone number. It was fed to an Automatic Location Identification, or ALI, database, which provided the physical address of the phone. Even if the caller was too sick or injured to give his location, the rescuers could find him. Not so with cell phones. By definition, they and their users are constantly on the move, so a cell phone number does not correspond to a fixed physical location.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

A pair of trousers could be made using yarn spun in Bangladesh that was then woven into fabric and dyed in India, China, or Vietnam; the zipper might be manufactured in Japan and the buttons in China; and the whole could be stitched together in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, or Honduras. Each stage was undertaken in the most efficient location, with businesses and nations embracing a transnational system of production. Firms aggressively sought competitively priced raw materials, labor, and locations. With the ubiquitous call centers and processing hubs, business process outsourcing and multinational manufacturing became the norm. The reintegration of China, India, Russia, and Eastern Europe into the world economy increased the global labor pool from approximately 1.5 billion workers to nearly 3 billion. Costs fell as businesses relocated production to the cheapest locations.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

The United States, by contrast, is home to a greater share of public biotech companies (50 percent versus Europe’s 18 percent), perhaps indicating the greater maturity of the U.S. market. * MGI’s figure includes graduates trained in engineering, finance and accounting, life science research, and “professional generalists,” such as call center operatives. Young professionals are defined as graduates with up to seven years of experience. * The right-wing attack on American universities as being out-of-touch ivory towers has always puzzled me. In a highly competitive global environment, these institutions dominate the field. * Birthrates in China could be underreported owing to the government’s one-child policy.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the five-day shutdown of Internet access in Egypt resulted in a loss of about US$90 million in revenue due to blocked telecommunications and Internet services, which account for around US$18 million per day; about 3 or 4 percent of Egypt’s annual GDP. But this estimate did not include loss of business in other sectors affected by the shutdown such as e-commerce, tourism and call center services. Indeed, IT outsourcing firms in Egypt account for revenues of 3 million dollars a day, and this activity had to be interrupted during the Internet disconnection. Tourism, a fundamental sector in the Egyptian economy, was severely affected by the shutdown. Furthermore, foreign direct investors would be unable to operate in a country that would cut off the Internet for a prolonged period.


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

There was far too much to cope with, incorporating far too many interrelations and links. Expert systems didn’t die out entirely, but ended up restricted to more sophisticated versions of the “how to boil an egg” expertise. You are most likely to come across such systems in the diagnostic scripts used by call centers and in some computer apps, which attempt to work out why a piece of technology isn’t working. But the experts of this world were able to rest happy in their beds. A real-life HAL 9000 based on expert system technology was never likely to replace them because their expertise could not be extracted and structured into a database.


pages: 287 words: 92,118

The Blue Cascade: A Memoir of Life After War by Mike Scotti

Bear Stearns, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, Donald Trump, fixed income, friendly fire, index card, information security, London Interbank Offered Rate, military-industrial complex, rent control

I would like to also tell you how proud I am of both of you as well as all the other men and women that put their lives in danger in order for us all to live free and safe. All that you all have done for me and my whole family. You don’t know us, but you fought for us. I want to thank you. Crystal Lange * * * In the summer of 2007, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a national network of more than 130 independently operating crisis call centers linked to a series of toll-free lines, was established.5 Callers were initially asked if they were veterans of military service. In 2008, nearly thirty thousand veterans contacted the hotline. The following year, over sixty thousand veterans called. And in 2010, over eighty thousand veterans reached out to the suicide prevention hotline.6 On January 11, 2010, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Why has G-Auto succeed in avoiding this trend? Because G-Auto is taming the chaotic auto rickshaw market to the benefit of everyone. Nirmal Kumar, founder and CEO, G-Auto. Photo: G-Auto G-Auto leveraged technology with agility, and did so in advance of the rest of the transport sector. In addition to a call center and a website, its mobile app enables people to book, call, and track the vehicle. The technology has reduced the incidence of refusal, overcharging, and fare haggling, and has brought a great degree of safety to passengers by disclosing the identity of drivers both before and after hiring the autos.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

And because our more basic needs are met by a more limited pool of labor, a greater proportion of the American workforce—most of whom, in previous eras, would likely have toiled on farms and assembly lines—have been empowered to earn their livings by satisfying more fleeting demands. The guy who once might have worked in a steel mill now earns a living making custom window treatments. The woman who once would have done backbreaking labor on the family farm now works in the relative comfort of a telemarketing call center. Say what you will about which job you’d prefer in a perfect world, two things are true: food and steel satisfy a more basic need than window treatments and customer service, and the latter two jobs are significantly less taxing and dangerous. It wasn’t always obvious that things would turn out this way.


pages: 250 words: 87,503

The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron by Rebecca Winters Keegan

call centre, Colonization of Mars, company town, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, drop ship, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, the payments system

Before she left the production in the hands of casting director Margery Simkin, Finn found Cameron’s leading lady, a then-little-known actress named Zoe Saldana. Raised in Queens, New York, and the Dominican Republic, Saldana is the daughter of a Dominican father and a Puerto Rican mother. She studied ballet as a child and broke into show business at age twenty-one via a forgettable dance movie called Center Stage. Saldana’s unique beauty and athleticism would later earn her small roles in big movies—as the lone female pirate swashbuckling alongside Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and as an officious airport worker in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal.


pages: 406 words: 88,820

Television disrupted: the transition from network to networked TV by Shelly Palmer

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Golden age of television, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, James Watt: steam engine, Leonard Kleinrock, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, market design, Metcalfe’s law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

The upside for the consumer is that smaller, service-oriented organizations with very specific consumer value propositions will often offer higher quality customer service than traditional telephone companies. Virgin “owns the customer experience” from the handset through to the customer service call center. You can expect to see several attempts at “affinity” or “branded” mobile phone services using this MVNO concept. Industry experts say that after it shakes out, the business can truly only support a handful a major players. In the meantime, expect to see wireless phones from cable companies giving them a quadruple play so they can compete “apples to apples” with the telcos.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

Push-oriented companies not only suppress the creative instincts of their workers, they ultimately suppress the individuals themselves—except perhaps for the inner political animal, which gets a chance to thrive, often with non-value-adding (and sometimes destructive) results. For example, individuals find infinite ways to game virtually any top-down performance-management system so that they can advance their own agenda—whether it is a salesperson “sand-bagging” orders into the next quarter or the call-center manager framing questions in customer-satisfaction surveys to show high satisfaction rates. Push-driven programs require standardization and predictability. But individuals, especially passionate ones, are ultimately unique and unpredictable. Summarizing the philosophy of push, we might tally the following instincts, assumptions, and beliefs: • There’s not enough to go around.


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

My argument is, you absolutely do. You can learn from that…. And you can be a better company by listening and being involved in that conversation.” Of course, the company did more than blog to get itself out of trouble. Dell spent $150 million in 2007 beefing up its justifiably maligned customer-support call centers. Dick Hunter, former head of manufacturing, left retirement to head customer service and brought a factory-floor zeal for management and measurement to the task. The company had been judging phone-center employees on their “handle time” per call, but Hunter realized this metric only motivated them to transfer callers, getting rid of complaining customers and making them someone else’s problem.


pages: 534 words: 15,752

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg

air freight, Akira Okazaki, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, flag carrier, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, haute cuisine, means of production, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, telemarketer, trade route, urban renewal

India’s upscale Taj Hotels chain has already introduced sushi to its Chennai location, and partnered with former Iron Chef and Nobu protégé Masaharu Morimoto in Mumbai. But when given stereo types about Calcutta, people choose to eat raw fish there, India will make a successful claim to a Western ideal of modernity that no number of outsourced call centers can. Consumption of sushi has become an indispensably conspicuous display of a modern economy. Some offhandedly estimate that there are 50 million new Chinese sushi eaters to be made in coming years. (That figure would require only about one-tenth of China’s anticipated middle-class population in 2020 to develop a taste for raw fish, less than the 15 percent of Americans who said they had recently eaten or regularly eat sushi in a 2001 study by the Food Marketing Institute.)


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

A poor country can easily compete with Sweden in a wide range of manufactures, but it takes many decades, if not centuries, to catch up with Sweden’s institutions. India demonstrates the limitations of relying on services rather than industry in the early stages of development. The country has developed remarkable strengths in IT services, such as software and call centers. But the bulk of the Indian labor force lacks the skills and education to be absorbed into such sectors. In East Asia, unskilled workers were put to work in urban factories, making several times what they earned in the countryside. In India, they remain on the land or move to construction and petty services (where their productivity is not much higher).


pages: 279 words: 90,278

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

call centre, financial independence, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, late fees, Mason jar, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor

We wore hard hats when we went in and out of the mill with sacks of feed. A tall, poorly ventilated column full of dusty grain in the Kansas summer is a volatile thing. While I worked there, a grain elevator to the east blew up and killed seven men working inside it. Once the June harvest was done, I worked fifty miles away at a hotel reservations call center on the far east side of Wichita. College hadn’t even started yet, and I’d been exhausted for years. In August, I handed a man $3,000 in cash for a small brown sedan with a good engine and a deep gash in the driver’s seat. A few days after I turned eighteen, I loaded the backseat of my car and said goodbye to Mom in the driveway of a suburban town house into which she, Bob, and Matt had recently moved.


pages: 423 words: 92,798

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

They can do it by systematically structuring their many strong connections—family, religious groups, sports teams, hunting clubs—into their campaigns. That a more organic relationship with the public exists for some workers, such as mission-driven service workers, doesn’t mean that only they should tether their quality of life to that of the broader community. All workers, whether their shop floor is a call center or a factory, can tell the story of their overstressed work situation—ordinarily not seen by the consumer, but certainly understood by the rest of the working class. Solidarity among human beings can happen spontaneously, as in a flood or fire, or by design, through organizing. Service workers tend to be less structurally powerful economically in the workplace than the mostly male workers of the CIO era, because it is easier to replace them and because when they do strike, not only the employer but also the consumer immediately feels the repercussions of their collective action.


pages: 325 words: 92,272

House to House: An Epic Memoir of War by David Bellavia

call centre, defense in depth, operational security

As the two of us smoke and joke, watching the Iraqi sun sinking on the horizon, Captain Sean Sims, our company commander, appears and steps past us to climb inside our Bradley. He sits down and props his feet up. He’s been tense and short-tempered ever since we got the orders for Fallujah. I’ve also seen him head to the call center almost every night to talk with his wife. Prior to October, he rarely did that. “Staff Sergeant Fitts and Staff Sergeant Bellavia. How are you two gentlemen doing?” I am a little surprised by Sims’s friendly tone. When Fitts returned to us over the summer, his wounds only half-healed, our captain tried to kick him out of the company.


pages: 325 words: 90,659

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, barriers to entry, bitcoin, business process, call centre, carbon credits, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, failed state, financial innovation, illegal immigration, Mark Zuckerberg, microcredit, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Skype, TED Talk, vertical integration

There began a great migration of manufacturing power to Latin America, North Africa, and the Far East. In 2000–2003, foreign companies built 60,000 factories in China alone. In San Pedro Sula, the textile factories sit alongside car-part production lines, fruit-packing warehouses, and air-conditioned call-centers, where English-speaking locals handle inquiries from customers in the United States. The offshoring boom has delighted Western consumers, who have found themselves paying less for their Honduran socks and Chinese computers. (It has horrified some Western workers, meanwhile, who have seen their jobs go south and east.)


pages: 304 words: 88,773

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

The Bloomberg administration has subsequently launched a majority quality-of-life initiative combating city noise. Much as the COMPSTAT system revolutionized the way the police department fought crime by mapping problem areas with new precision, the 311 service automatically records the location of each incoming complaint in a massive Siebel Systems call-center database that feeds information throughout the city government. Geo-mapping software displays which streets have chronic pothole troubles and which blocks are battling graffiti. Increase the knowledge that the government has of its constituents’ problems, and increase the constituents’ knowledge of the solutions offered for those problems, and you have a recipe for civic health that goes far beyond the superficial appeal of “quality of life” campaigns.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

“This happened while I was wearing their uniform and driving one of their company vehicles,” Henderson, a forty-year-old military veteran, told me:My foot is destroyed. I have a fused ankle. I have had over a dozen surgeries. It hurts to wear a sock. I was limping pretty badly, but in the spring of 2008, FedEx said I had to come back to work and sit in a chair. It saved them money on workers’ compensation payments. I worked a call center job and answered telephones. I did that for three months. I had my ankle fused in January 2009, and then FedEx fired me. I was discarded. They washed their hands of me, and none of this was my fault.36 Our destitute working class now understands that the cloying feel-your-pain language of the liberal class is a lie.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

Only within the past three decades have we seen the appearance of the elephant’s head, representing most of humanity, the upraised trunk representing the world’s most affluent, and the trough between them occupied by the rich world’s middle class. The first decades after the end of World War II were a time of large and sustained income gains for this middle class. Recently, though, the gains for this group have slowed. While this was happening, gains for just about everyone else—from Chinese assembly-line workers to Indian call-center employees to bankers in New York and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley—increased as never before. Is it any wonder, then, that many within the rich world’s middle classes feel that they’ve been treated unfairly? Or that these feelings appear to be intensifying as we move deeper into the Second Machine Age and the two horsemen of capitalism and tech progress continue to gallop around the world?


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

By the time the company hit the five-thousand-per-week production goal, its service centers were overwhelmed. Repair delays, parts shortages, and long lines for service were reported in high-density markets like California and Norway. Tesla took steps to address the crisis, opening a new parts distribution center and call center, piloting a network of body repair shops, and expanding its mobile repair service, but word of the chaos inside the company was spreading. In the summer of 2018, Tesla faced a set of circumstances not unlike those it had faced leading up to its pivotal 2013 “miracle.” Though the Model 3 was earning rave reviews from road testers who praised its design and engineering, Tesla’s slow production ramp and its shortcomings in manufacturing quality and service were scaring customers off with just under 20 percent of reservations canceled by the end of the third quarter.


pages: 350 words: 90,898

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

What used to take hours each week was reduced to one short session during which he signed checks—a step he admits he could have also automated, but decided not to so he could maintain a more tangible understanding of his expenses. Another of these new systems streamlined customer service by providing clear guidelines that empowered employees to handle most service issues directly, without Carpenter’s involvement. The basic operating procedure for how his call center staff answered calls also became strictly codified, providing much more consistent service (with fewer performance issues for Carpenter to address), and even the process for onboarding new employees was made largely automatic, greatly reducing the complexities created by staff turnover. “The logic of it was crystal clear, exquisite,” he writes.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Doing what you love “exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them,” Tokumitsu argues, “when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or responsible scheduling becomes crass.”3 Take the example of Elizabeth, who identifies as a white Latina and grew up middle class in Florida. As an undergrad, she attended the Disney College Program, which provides a hybrid internship and “study abroad” experience, only instead of a foreign country, it’s at … Disney. Afterward, she was desperate to find a job, any job, with the company—even one at its call center. The position was a total dead end, with no means of advancement, just the expectation that you should be grateful to have a Disney job in the first place. “At Disney, they bank on your love of the company,” she said. “I did love the company and their products, but that didn’t make the barely-above-minimum-wage pay okay.”


pages: 406 words: 88,977

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In Pakistan, for example, health officials paused polio vaccination campaigns early in 2020 because of the transmission risk posed by vaccinators moving from one community to another. In March, though, they saw an opportunity: They could set up an emergency operations center for COVID modeled on the one for polio. Within a few weeks, more than 6,000 health workers who had been trained to watch for signs of polio were taught about COVID symptoms as well. A call center that had been set up to take reports of possible polio cases was repurposed for COVID; anyone in the country could call a toll-free number to get reliable information from a trained professional. Staff from the polio EOC moved over to the COVID center to log case numbers, coordinate contact tracing, and share this information throughout the government—all functions that had been built up during the polio campaign.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

Loco also began out of frustration, when Jon Sewell, a retired hospital administrator turned calzone restaurateur in Iowa City, saw what happened when Grubhub purchased a locally owned delivery company called Order Up. Overnight his delivery rates doubled, from 15 to 30 percent, and complaints from customers exploded when the local service staff were replaced by a remote call center. Grubhub told the restaurants they had two months to sign a new agreement, or they’d be cut off from their delivery customers. Sewell, who had a history of building cooperative ventures between various hospitals and health care providers, saw a better way. The technology these apps used wasn’t novel, and white-label software was widely available.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

Capitalism not only continues to take care work for granted but also expects the skills developed through this work to be available for sale in the world of commodity production. So it is that gendered ideas lead to women being sought—and cheapened—for their nimble fingers, caring attitudes, and supportive miens (for example) by those looking to hire cheap workers for maquilas, call centers, and nursing care industries, those workers having been trained through a lifetime of cheap care and expected to have certain skills because they are women.81 There are gendered expectations not only of skills transferred from care work but also of flexibility. It might appear that the precariat—workers who lack the job security, pensions, and organizing bodies normally associated with mid-twentieth-century industrial workers in the Global North—is experiencing something new.82 But mobility, flexibility, and permanent availability have long been hallmarks of care work.


pages: 441 words: 96,534

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan

autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, megaproject, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, self-driving car, sharing economy, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

A spokeswoman for the speaker of the city council quickly declared that New York City had bigger problems to deal with. Manhattan’s borough president, Gale Brewer, a longtime friend and a true champion of public space, said the idea of removing the plazas was “preposterous.” “Putting back the honking, angry, fumy Broadway parking lot at the so-called center of the world would be no accomplishment,” she wrote in a statement. “Surely we cannot go back to destroying the city in order to make it safe for more cars.” Brewer’s bluntness echoed that of those who would be most affected by the change: the businesses, entertainment, and hospitality industries built around Times Square.


pages: 293 words: 97,431

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard

A Pattern Language, call centre, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, congestion pricing, Frank Gehry, global village, Google Earth, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, job satisfaction, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, peak oil, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Snow Crash, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban sprawl

In a series of books culminating in the four-volume work ambitiously entitled The Nature of Order, Alexander argues for the integral connections of everything from quantum mechanics to living rooms to religious epiphany. What links all these things together, he says, is a set of principles that describe the ways in which what he calls centers, which are explicitly spatial, contribute to “wholeness.” According to Alexander, these rules govern everything from how the large-scale matter of the universe is ordered to what size and shape of living room in a house makes for peace and stillness.10 Given my thumbnail sketch, you might be left thinking that Alexander is something of a New Age mystic, but such an impression would be deeply misguided.


pages: 335 words: 100,331

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel by Gail Honeyman

call centre, dark pattern, Schrödinger's Cat

This June Mullen was the first visitor I’d had since November last year. They come around every six months or so, the Social Work visits. She’s my first visitor this calendar year. The meter reader hasn’t been yet, although I must say I prefer it when they leave a card and I can phone in my reading. I do love call centers; it’s always so interesting to hear all the different accents and try to find out a bit about the person you’re talking to. The best part is when they ask, at the end, Is there anything else I can help you with today, Eleanor? and I can then reply, No, no thank you, you’ve completely and comprehensively resolved my problems.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

China has become, in the words of one specialist, “a manufacturing hub for the rest of the world in low-end labor-intensive goods.”55 India shows that services as well as manufacturing can be lifted from the West. When you phone your bank in Boston or your building society in Edinburgh, you can easily find yourself talking to someone sitting in a call center in Bangalore. The oldest symbolic meanings of West and East are now revived: the West as the evening country, where the setting sun goes in search of Elysium, the East as the realm of the rising sun. Just how quickly that sun will rise is disputed. How big are the economies of China and India, and how fast are they likely to grow?


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

(“One bipedal machine managed to wrap a claw around the door handle and open it but was flummoxed by a breeze that kept blowing the door shut before it could pass through.”9) Some start-ups are currently employing humans to pretend they’re robots: the software company Expensify had to hire humans to sort receipts because its robots couldn’t handle the job, and the speech tech firm SpinVox was hiring humans in foreign call centers to convert voice mails into text messages.10 Our Alexa is significantly less competent than our mutt, who is unflummoxed by breezy doors. None of this is to say that these technologies aren’t coming, and soon—they are. But we’ve got a window, even if it’s closing at exponential speed. It’s still possible to imagine regulating AI, and we should.


pages: 364 words: 102,225

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep

battle of ideas, British Empire, call centre, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, illegal immigration, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Kibera, knowledge economy, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, urban planning, urban renewal

One gaping hole stood next to the Civic Centre. A mayoral aide took me to the edge of this yawning pit. He said it would soon become the basement of a skyscraper on city-owned land, called the “IT Tower”—for information technology. A Malaysian firm planned to attract the kind of back-office jobs and call centers that American firms had lately been locating in India. We walked back inside the Civic Centre, where an oversized artist’s rendering of the IT Tower was on display in the mayor’s outer office. The same room had a scale model of the proposed Karachi Monorail. It was an office full of dreams. After a while Kamal burst out to greet me, and took me to visit a newly opened complaint center inside the building.


pages: 348 words: 98,757

The Trade of Queens by Charles Stross

business intelligence, call centre, Dr. Strangelove, false flag, illegal immigration, index card, inflation targeting, land reform, multilevel marketing, profit motive, Project for a New American Century, seigniorage

Area code is 506—" They worked down the list over the course of an hour, as the jug of coffee cooled and the evening shadows lengthened outside. There were five numbers to call for varying lengths of time, at set minimum intervals; the third had an annoying voice menu system to navigate, asking for a quotation for auto insurance, and the fifth—answered in an Indian call center somewhere—was the only one with human interaction required: "Sorry, wrong number." The whole tedious business was necessary for several reasons. A couple of random numbers to make traffic analysis harder; a couple of flags to say I need to talk and I am not under duress; and words spoken into a recording device to prove that the contact was, in fact, Paulette Milan, and not an agent in an FTO office.


pages: 304 words: 22,886

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, continuous integration, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, endowment effect, equity premium, feminist movement, financial engineering, fixed income, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, index fund, invisible hand, late fees, libertarian paternalism, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, medical malpractice, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, pension reform, presumed consent, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Zipcar

Some colleges’ financial aid offices have tag-teamed with lenders who had provided gifts, stock options, and “donations” to the college in order to become “preferred lenders”—a kind of “Good Housekeeping” stamp for student loans.5 Occasionally, a college’s financial aid staff tells students that they may choose only lenders on a “preferred” list, even if these lenders don’t necessarily provide loans in the best interest of the student. At one university, a lender was allowed to provide staff for a call center under a college’s name; when students called in to ask about loans, those “unbiased” employees pushed their own company’s loans. When students took out these loans, the lender kindly shared profits with the college. One might wonder why lenders are so eager to get the student loan business that they are willing to engage in practices that are at least sleazy and possibly illegal.


pages: 309 words: 100,573

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections by Patrick Smith

Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collective bargaining, crew resource management, D. B. Cooper, high-speed rail, inflight wifi, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, legacy carrier, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, race to the bottom, Skype, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, zero-sum game

Moments after liftoff, we’re handed over to departure control, which follows us on radar issuing turns, altitudes, and so forth as the plane is sequenced into the overlying route structure. A flight can progress through several departure subsectors, each on a different frequency. Once we reach higher altitude, we’re guided by a series of Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC), commonly called “Center.” New York Center, Denver Center, etc. They maintain huge swaths of sky, rendering them somewhat irrelevant to their namesake identifiers, and are often located far from an airport. Boston Center, for instance, in charge of airspace extending from Southern New England to the Canadian Maritimes, resides in a building in Nashua, New Hampshire.


Fodor's Dordogne & the Best of Southwest France With Paris by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

call centre, carbon tax, flag carrier, glass ceiling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, haute cuisine, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, subprime mortgage crisis, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, young professional

PHONES The good news is that you can now make a direct-dial telephone call from virtually any point on earth. The bad news? You may pay dearly for the convenience. Calling from a hotel is almost always the most expensive option; hotels usually add huge surcharges to all calls, particularly international ones. In some countries you can phone from call centers or even the post office. Calling cards usually keep costs to a minimum, but only if you purchase them locally. And then there are mobile phones (below), which are sometimes more prevalent—particularly in the developing world—than landlines; as expensive as mobile phone calls can be, they are still usually a much cheaper option than calling from your hotel.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

We did a search of the consumer data sets we had acquired for the pilot and found a handful of people whose data showed that they did both. I instantly wanted to meet one of these mythical creatures, in part because I was curious but also because I wanted to make sure our data was accurate. We pulled the names that came up, then sent them to a call center, where agents phoned each person to ask if they’d be willing to meet with a researcher to answer some questions. Most said no, but there was one woman who agreed—and whom I couldn’t wait to meet. Her spending habits seemed all over the map—a Whole Foods shopper with an interest in yoga, but also a member of an anti-gay church and a donor to right-wing charities—which made me suspect that either our data was somehow faulty or this person was among the most fascinating characters in the United States.


pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

APPENDIX THE SUMMER 2011 BATCH Updated March 2013 Adpop Media: Software for product placement in video after filming After YC, pivoted to found OvenLabs to work on a service related to privacy Agile Diagnosis: iPad software for doctors, medical students, and nurses Aisle50: Daily grocery deals BentoBox: (See Streak) BridgeUs: Conference call service Bushido: Hosting open-source apps After YC, renamed as Cloudfuji BuySimple: Micropayments system for media publishers Name changed from Minno Withdrew early from YC; pivoted to build Twice, an online store for secondhand women’s clothing CampusCred: Local deals for college students After YC, pivoted to work on TheQuad, a to-do mobile app for college students Can’t Wait: Mobile app for receiving trailers of upcoming movies After YC, pivoted to work on Clutch.io, offering software tools to speed the development of mobile apps; acquired by Twitter Citus Data: Fast database software for very large data collections Cityposh: Casual online games combined with sponsored advertising ClassMetric: Software for college students to provide instructors with real-time feedback during lectures After YC, pivoted to work on Segment.io, providing an API for analytics data Clerky: Software for automating routine legal work Codecademy: Online courses to learn how to program Cryptoseal: Security software for servers in the cloud DebtEye: (See SpringCoin) DoubleRecall: Advertising software for Web publishers with paywalls Embark: Mobile app for mass transit riders Name changed from Pandav Envolve: Chat software for Web sites After YC, pivoted to work on Firebase, which stores data used by real-time online services like chat and games Everyme: A social network based on the user’s address book Freshplum: Software for determining optimal e-commerce prices GlassMap: Mobile app for sharing location automatically; acquired by Groupon GoCardless: Replaces credit cards for online purchases Graffiti Labs: Creators of Facebook Graffiti; after YC, released Buildy, a building game Hiptic: Personal Web sites After YC, pivoted to work on mobile games Imgix: Stores and prepares images used by Web sites Interstate: Project management software Interview Street: Software to help tech companies winnow the best programmers among applicants Kicksend: Easy file sharing Launchpad Toys: Publishes software for the iPad for kids to engage in creative play Leaky: Price comparison site for insurance MarketBrief: Entirely automated translation of SEC filings into easy-to-read articles Meteor: Software for developers to manage data that moves between cloud storage and clients Name changed from Skybreak MileSense: Smartphone app to enable safe drivers to get lower insurance rates Minno: (See BuySimple) MixRank: Service that analyzes competitors’ online advertising MobileWorks: Crowdsourcing tasks that are too difficult for computers alone MongoHQ: Hosts MongoDB databases Munch on Me: Daily deals at restaurants After YC, acquired by CollegeBudget NowSpots: Supplies newspaper Web sites with tweets from advertisers in place of display ads After YC, pivoted to start Perfect Audience, a service that retargets lost customers from Facebook and the Web Opez: Yelp for individual service professionals like personal trainers, hairstylists, and bartenders PageLever: Software for analyzing the fans that come to a business’s Facebook page Acquired by Unified Pandav: (See Embark) Paperlinks: Infrastructure for businesses that use QR codes Parse: Stores data in the cloud for developers of mobile apps Paystack: Online payment system for kids to use After YC, pivoted to work on mobile payments PhoneSys: Call center software for sales teams; name changed from Pingm Picplum: Sends photo prints to relatives Pingm: (See PhoneSys) Proxino: Cloud hosting for JavaScript code Quartzy: Software for managing inventories of laboratories in the life sciences Rap Genius: A Wikipedia for annotated rap lyrics Rentobo: Software tool to help landlords find and sign new tenants for rental properties Ridejoy: Ride sharing Science Exchange: Marketplace for outsourcing scientific experiments SellStage: Product videos for Web sites After YC, pivoted to work on Videopixie, a marketplace for professional video editing Sift Science: Software to detect online payment fraud Skybreak: (See Meteor) Snapjoy: Stores and organizes photos Acquired by Dropbox SpringCoin: Software-based debt counseling Name changed from DebtEye Streak: Customer relations management software accessed within Gmail Name changed from BentoBox Stypi: Collaborative document creation and editing online Acquired by Salesforce.com Tagstand: Support for NFC (near-field communication) services TapEngage: Creates advertising for tablets Acquired by Dropbox TightDB: Software for developers that makes databases superfluous Verbling: Service that sets up video chats between foreign-language learners and native speakers Vidyard: YouTube for businesses Vimessa: App for video voice mail After YC, pivoted to work on UserFox, an e-mail marketing service Yardsale: Mobile apps for peer-to-peer commerce within one’s own neighborhood Zigfu: Tools to create games using full-body motions NOTES The following abbreviations are used in the notes: HN Hacker News HT Harj Taggar PG Paul Graham (all sources cited are found at PaulGraham.com unless otherwise noted) TC TechCrunch YC Y Combinator INTRODUCTION 1.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

The results were often underwhelming: San Franciscans complained about the quality of coffee; people generally liked square offices more than rectangular ones; noise was an issue in every glass cubicle, but it was an especially terrible fate to rent space in a WeWork that also rented an office to a call center. The Polaris team had a macabre favorite among the nuggets describing the experience of being inside WeWork’s labyrinth of glass walls: “It feels like you’re in a future jail.” But Silicon Valley’s ethos was to distrust the opinion of humans alone, and the “Google Analytics for space” team began scraping WeWork spaces for physical data, installing sensors under conference room tables to determine how many people were using them during the day.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

The memory of what it felt like to transform raw ore into steel pipes and to be part of the connected, prosperous community that work generated still haunts the children and grandchildren of those workers. They long for the sense of purpose that industrial labor brought, even as they stock shelves at Walmart, wait tables at Applebee’s, and try to persuade strangers to make donations from a cubicle at the local call center.36 As the numbers of industrial jobs have declined, so have working-class incomes—a sharp reversal from the trend after World War II. For the past four decades in the United States, those below the top 20 percent, including much of what is regarded as the middle class, have enjoyed no consistent gains.37 The median lifetime incomes (over an assumed thirty-year working life) of American men in all occupations who entered the labor market in 1983 were up to one-fifth lower than those of the cohorts who began work in 1967.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

There’s almost no end to it. One of the biggest stresses in these households is when things go wrong. The house has ants, or the front door lock is catchy, or they get in a fender bender. When they call customer service, they want to talk to an employee of the company. Not an answering service. Not someone in India at a call center reading a help menu. This may sound like a very cynical way to view the economy, but it’s accurate. You can clearly see this on full display in the job listings on the online job boards. When I started writing this chapter, Indeed.com listed 4.7 million jobs. Seventy percent of them paid less than $50,000, and half pay $35,000 or less.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

But the problem is that we had to consider the future customers as well as the current ones. Because if all we focused on were the current ones, we might not have any future ones at all. So we let those complaints continue until we were positioned to solve the problems. We flew out to Omaha and set up a call center. Within two months, a two-hundred-person customer service department was up and running. Problem solved—and I wouldn’t have solved it a moment sooner. When facing these kinds of choices, I start by assessing probabilities: Is the probability of this disaster going up or down? And also: What’s the actual damage if it hits?


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

Its combination of the written word and visual design led to a flourishing in new forms of illustration and graphic design, reminiscent of the beautiful flowing style of Islamic calligraphy. To this day, Glyphish continues to inspire new generations of artists—just as it was inspired by previous generations. 17    THE VALUE OF WORK Earth, 2026 Fast-food chefs. Drivers. Supermarket checkout attendants. Bookshop managers. Street cleaners. Call center operators. Teaching assistants. Bookkeepers. Pilots. Soldiers. Lab technicians. Publishing executives. Warehouse fulfilment workers. Fishermen. Farmers. Copywriters. Couriers. Assembly-line workers. Actors. Bank tellers. Financial traders. Parking attendants. Personal trainers. The value of a skill decays over time.


Lonely Planet Mexico by John Noble, Kate Armstrong, Greg Benchwick, Nate Cavalieri, Gregor Clark, John Hecht, Beth Kohn, Emily Matchar, Freda Moon, Ellee Thalheimer

AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, Burning Man, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, language acquisition, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines, urban sprawl, wage slave

For southbound travelers, Santa Rosalía offers the first glimpse of the Sea of Cortez after a long, dry crossing of the Desierto de Vizcaíno. Orientation & Information Central Santa Rosalía is a cluster of densely packed houses, restaurants, inns and stores. Plaza Benito Juárez, four blocks west of the highway, is the town center. Hotel del Real, on the exit road from town, has long-distance cabinas (call centers). Cafe Internet PC Vision ( 152-28-75; cnr Calles 6th & Obregón; per hr M$20; 10am-10pm) Internet access. Post office (cnr Av Constitución & Calle 2) Sights Built in 1885 by the French to house the offices of the Boleo Company, the Museo Histórico Minero de Santa Rosalía ( 152-29-99; Cousteau 1; admission M$20; 8am-3pm Mon-Fri, 9am-1pm Sat) watches over the town and the rusting copperworks from its perch on the hill near the Hotel Francés, surrounded by cool abandoned locomotives and other pieces of machinery.

Most bar-hopping Texans stick to the large clubs on and east of Avenida Guerrero; the bars west of Avenida Guerrero tend to draw a rough local crowd. Information Most services you might need are along Avenida Guerrero and Plaza Hidalgo, including casas de cambio, banks with ATMs, internet cafés, long-distance call centers, the post office (Plaza Hidalgo) and the tourist office ( 712-73-97; Palacio Federal; www.nuevolaredo.gob.mx; 9am-5pm Mon-Fri). Sleeping & Eating Avenida Reforma south of Avenida Guerrero has several overpriced business-class hotels and some good-value midrangers. There are very cheap rooms, especially good for solo travelers, fronting the main bus station.

Mexicana ( 800-801-20-10) is among a handful of national airlines that offers daily flights to major Mexican cities. Continental ( 800-900-50-00) operates regular flights between Tampico and Houston, Texas. BUS Tampico’s modern bus station ( 213-00-47) is 7km north of the center on Rosalio Bustamante. There are stores selling snacks, taco stands, a call center and luggage storage. First-class buses run to most major towns north of Mexico City and down the Gulf coast. Deluxe and 2nd-class services also run to many of these destinations. For Xilitla, the quickest way is to travel to Ciudad Valles and get a connection there. CAR & MOTORCYCLE Hwy 180 north of Tampico is a good highway for about 80km, then narrows to a two-lane northeast to Aldama or northwest on Hwy 81 to Ciudad Victoria.


pages: 427 words: 112,549

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

augmented reality, big-box store, British Empire, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, corporate personhood, digital map, game design, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Naomi Klein, new economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, private military company, RFID, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, the scientific method, young professional

The center of the room looked to be a staging area, bustling with young people, all wearing eyewear and gloves. To the side was a raised platform lined with office chairs and desks where a dozen people were grabbing, pulling, and pushing at invisible objects in the air. They were all speaking to unseen people, as though it were a call center. Fossen nodded. "Telemarketers." He turned to her. "This is one of those network marketing schemes, isn't it? I'm really disappointed in--" "Dad! It's nothing like that." She walked up to a canvas tarp draped over a large object. She pulled it away, revealing an old, wooden piece of equipment.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

His government oversaw the establishment of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institutes of Technology, and the Indian Institutes of Management, which are among the best professional training centers in any emerging market—indeed, in any market at all. This talent base fuels foreign direct investment. Over the past two decades, many multinationals have shifted research and development departments to India. Call centers, medical billing centers, and other business administration services also developed rapidly. However, India has neglected primary education, leading to widespread inequality of opportunity. The single best thing that could happen for India’s positioning as a center for the industries of the future would be for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to make the kind of commitment to primary education that the Nehru government made to higher education.


pages: 376 words: 110,796

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

Reporters from many of the major city newspapers jotted down his words and snapped photos of this sixty-three-year-old rocket engineer who looked like a holdover from the Sputnik era, with his militarystyle flat top haircut and olive drab outfit. About ten o'clock that night Feeney got an urgent call from his telephone call center. He had worked a deal with an LA radio station that asked for listeners to call in and volunteer to be PPE's astronaut. "Feeney had hired three women to take the calls," Oelerich recalled. "But at the end of the day, they called him and said they were shutting down and going home. Their phones had not stopped ringing the whole day, and they had gotten goo volunteer astronauts."


pages: 451 words: 103,606

Machine Learning for Hackers by Drew Conway, John Myles White

call centre, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Debian, Erdős number, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, off-by-one error, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, recommendation engine, social graph, SpamAssassin, statistical model, text mining, the scientific method, traveling salesman

Exponential distribution Because the mode of the exponential distribution occurs at zero, it’s almost like you had cut off the positive half of a bell to produce the exponential curve. This distribution comes up quite a lot when the most frequent value in your data set is zero and only positive values can ever occur. For example, corporate call centers often find that the length of time between the calls they receive looks like an exponential distribution. As you build up a greater familiarity with data and learn more about the theoretical distributions that statisticians have studied, these distributions will become more familiar to you—especially because the same few distributions come up over and over again.


pages: 362 words: 108,359

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street by Jonathan A. Knee

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business logic, call centre, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, deal flow, discounted cash flows, fear of failure, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, if you build it, they will come, iterative process, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, proprietary trading, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, technology bubble, young professional, éminence grise

And I find that people like to talk about their own businesses and are flattered when outsiders take an interest in what they do. So while others dozed at sessions where group heads talked about their businesses—signing up sports rights, selling advertising against the entrenched incumbents, dealing with regulators, managing the call center or the satellite uplink—I listened closely. And rather than rushing back to the office to attend to more pressing matters with my colleagues, I would stick around and ask a few more questions. As a result, by the time we started writing I knew more about the businesses than my colleagues, so it wasn’t hard to make it look like I was contributing at the endless prospectus drafting sessions.


pages: 392 words: 104,760

Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners by Michael Erard

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, cognitive load, complexity theory, European colonialism, language acquisition, machine translation, pattern recognition, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Skype, Steven Pinker, theory of mind

“A lot of Indians can’t understand other Indians in English, because each region has its own accent.” One example: the English word zoo. Because Indian languages don’t have the z, the word is pronounced “soo” (in the south) or “joo” (in the north). This sort of native inflection can keep people from getting jobs in the booming call-center industry in Hyderabad and Bangalore, two huge, bustling cities that are home to high-tech companies and the “business process outsourcing” industry. Eapen’s school was one of dozens teaching the “soft skills”: team building, negotiation, and English pronunciation. Students were paying him 6,000 rupees (about $126 US) to help them neutralize their accents in English; he himself has a crisp British accent, which he honed working in Kuwait and Dubai.


pages: 370 words: 112,602

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cass Sunstein, charter city, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, experimental subject, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, land tenure, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, microcredit, moral hazard, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, tontine, urban planning

School enrollment is sensitive to the rate of returns to education: During the Green Revolution in India, which raised the level of technical know-how needed to be a successful farmer and thereby increased the value of learning, education increased faster in regions that were better suited to the new seeds introduced by the Green Revolution.9 More recently, there is the example of the offshore call centers. In Europe and the United States, they are usually vilified for taking away local jobs, but they have been part of a small social revolution in India by dramatically expanding young women’s employment opportunities. In 2002, Robert Jensen of the University of California at Los Angeles teamed up with some of these centers to organize recruiting sessions for young women in randomly selected villages in rural areas where recruiters would typically not go, in three states in northern India.


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

If so, and if some sort of walking-friendly input devices could be scrounged up or invented, then there would be no reason in principle why many workers couldn’t wander around freely for a substantial part of their workday. Cubicle farms could be replaced by large open spaces, devoid of furniture or other obstructions, where workers could move around in any way they liked. In good weather they could go outside and stroll around in the fresh air. Imagine taking a large call center and replacing it with a park dotted with wandering pedestrians, each equipped with a phone headset and an augmented-reality display giving them access to whatever data they needed to handle customer-service inquiries. Employee retention, which tends to be a serious headache in such operations, might be improved, and employee health ought to improve markedly.


pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Then they invited them into their boardroom, seating them at a long wooden table beneath an oil painting of the aftermath of a medieval battle. The attack the Prykarpattyaoblenergo executives described was almost identical to the one that hit Kyivoblenergo: BlackEnergy, corrupted firmware, disrupted backup power systems, KillDisk. But in this operation, the attackers had taken another step, bombarding the company’s call centers with fake phone calls—either to obscure customers’ warnings of the power outage or simply to add another layer of chaos and humiliation. It was as if the hackers were determined to impress an audience with the full array of their capabilities or to test the range of their arsenal. There was another difference from the other utility attacks, too.


pages: 353 words: 106,704

Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution by Beth Gardiner

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, connected car, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Hyperloop, index card, Indoor air pollution, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, white picket fence

Tighter requirements are imposed on cars and trucks registered in big cities, but not those in surrounding areas, or on one half of the country but not the other. A registered vehicle can drive anywhere, though, so many of the trucks plowing through Delhi spew much nastier exhaust than would be allowed if they were based there. The reasons for such deficits are complex, and much debated. For all the attention to its software start-ups and call centers, India’s per capita income is just $1,700 a year, a fifth that of China, the country with which it is most often lumped together in discussions of emerging economies and the environment.23 That poverty is both cause and effect of an infrastructure crisis that makes it difficult to run factories and ship goods.


pages: 421 words: 110,272

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Unemployment rates rise and fall, certainly for the country as a whole, but also in specific places as one kind of job is replaced by another—often a worse job replacing a better job. In some places where manufacturing has disappeared and people have lost jobs with a high-paying employer, they find other jobs, in services, or order fulfillment, or call centers, or driving for Uber. These jobs may pay less, and working conditions may be more stressful, but they keep people in the labor force. The journalist Amy Goldstein tells such a story about Janesville, Wisconsin, Paul Ryan’s hometown, after General Motors—known as “Generous” Motors because of its high hourly wages—closed its plant in 2008 after making Chevrolets there for eighty-five years.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

The chair of the WPP board, Roberto Quarta, addressed the succession question in April 2016: “Whether, in Sir Martin’s case, that happens tomorrow, in one, two, three, four, or five years, or even over a longer period, we have already begun to identify internal and external candidates who should be considered.” Could she imagine, Cristiana Falcone was asked, her husband retired? “No!” she exclaimed, laughing hysterically. “Can you imagine him in my kitchen putting knives and forks in order? I would have to outsource to a call center in India to call him all the time!” Sorrell offered another version of his wife’s response when asked in 2017 about his future at WPP: “I will stay here until they shoot me!” It is not inconceivable that WPP would be sold, in pieces or whole. Several years ago Sorrell did negotiate to sell WPP to Warren Buffett, but they did not see eye to eye on the price and the discussions amicably collapsed.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

What’s more, he believes that the Trump corporate tax cuts only exacerbated the trend, as companies incentivized to spend capital on long-term investments put that capital into technology, not people. “I do about thirty to thirty-five CEO calls with people in and out of the tech sector each month, and it’s all about how non-tech firms are implementing technology [in the place of people].” Kaplan believes that we are going to see call centers, airline baggage handlers, reservations agents, and even car dealers replaced by technology in the near future.25 The numbers are proving him right. Back in 1998, toward the end of the previous economic expansion, 48.3 percent of business investment went to new structures and industrial equipment (things like factories, machinery, and other brick-and-mortar infrastructure), and about 30 percent went into technology, such as information processing equipment and various types of intellectual property, according to data compiled by Daniel Alpert of Westwood Capital.


pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

“As their leader I said, ‘Hey I’ve let you guys down and I’m sorry, but this isn’t going to work out.’” The irony, of course, was that at least for the time being, Brian now had to do all the work himself. “I went from five trucks down to the ability to only run one at a time,” he said. “I was the call center. I did the booking, the dispatch, the junk hauling. I did everything.” He had to go backward, to that familiar Swiss Army knife phase of entrepreneurship, in order to move forward in the right direction and to lay down the roots of a culture that, twenty-five years later, is responsible for $250 million in annual revenue across hundreds of franchises in every major metropolitan area in Canada, Australia, and the United States.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

After their revolution in 1868, the Japanese realized that their burgeoning industry required the help of experts to flourish — experts that were not available in Japan. So they summoned the people who did know to come to Japan and get everything set up properly. These on-site visits were more common 150 years ago because, you know, that thing called the telephone did not exist yet. Today, outsourcing services can be provided remotely anywhere from call centers in Delhi to factories in Shantou. More importantly, access to the tools of international business is no longer an exclusive advantage of big business, it is available to anyone willing to take their business where it is treated best. For example, I sat down with Jake a while back to discuss the needs of his business working in affiliate marketing.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Trolls trolling trolls.” The Post report, which profiled numerous companies that paid trolls to spread disinformation, also warned that what was happening in the Philippines would likely find its way abroad. “The same young, educated, English-speaking workforce that made the Philippines a global call center and content moderation hub” will likely help the internationalization of Philippine’s shady PR firms, which will find willing clients in other countries’ domestic battles. The story of the Philippines is one that could be told in more or less similar terms the world over. In sub-Saharan Africa; throughout Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan, and Central Asia; spread across Central and South America; across the Middle East, the Gulf and North Africa — the same dynamics are playing themselves out, with a spice of local flavour and entrepreneurial variation.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

When I spoke with Paddy Lillis, the general secretary of the United Kingdom’s 450,000-member Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW), his plans for the future were uninspiring. USDAW represents a range of workers, from delivery drivers, butchers, and meatpackers to retail employees and workers in call centers. One of its primary organizing tactics involves leafleting local shopping centers with literature on the demise of brick-and-mortar retail. Though a time-honored strategy, leafleting does not scale like Amazon and Alibaba or persuade like social media. The relative progress that Lillis cited meant sitting on committees and having conference calls with people in government.


pages: 392 words: 109,945

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer

3D printing, Albert Einstein, biofilm, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, knapsack problem, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Lyft, microbiome, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, uber lyft

When people became ill, they could be put into quarantined hospital rooms. But SARS-CoV-2 lurked quietly in its hosts for days before creating its first symptoms. People went about their lives unaware of the multiplying viruses inside them or the clouds of infection they exhaled. They lingered over lunch at restaurants, they worked at call centers, they leaned on the railings of cruise ships plowing the Pacific. After infecting people around them, some of the virus’s hosts finally developed symptoms. Others never did. The unwittingly infected exported Covid-19 out of Wuhan. Some traveled across China to celebrate the Lunar New Year with their families.


pages: 322 words: 106,663

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

That I had worn a Jones New York suit to the interview really sealed the deal. She could call the suit by name because she asked me about the label in the interview. Another hiring manager, at my first professional job, looked me up and down in the waiting room, cataloging my outfit, and later told me that she had decided I was too classy to be on the call center floor. I was hired as a trainer instead. The difference meant no shift work, greater prestige, better pay, and a baseline salary for all my future employment. I have about a half dozen similar stories. What is remarkable is not that this happened. There is empirical evidence that women and people of color are judged by their appearances differently and more harshly than are white men.


Western USA by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donner party, East Village, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, off grid, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Cars pay a $6 toll to cross from Marin to San Francisco; pedestrians and cyclists stroll the east sidewalk for free. ALCATRAZ For 150 years, the name has given the innocent chills and the guilty cold sweats. Alcatraz ( Alcatraz Cruises 415-981-7625; www.alcatrazcruises.com, www.nps.gov/alcatraz; adult/child day $26/16, night $33/19.50; call center 8am-7pm) has been the nation’s first military prison, a maximum-security penitentiary housing A-list criminals like Al Capone, and hotly disputed Native American territory. No prisoners escaped Alcatraz alive, but since importing guards and supplies cost more than putting up prisoners at the Ritz, the prison was closed in 1963.

Many health-care professionals demand payment at the time of service, especially from out-of-towners or international visitors. » Except for medical emergencies (call 911 or go to the nearest 24-hour hospital emergency room or ER), phone around to find a doctor who will accept your insurance. » Keep all receipts and documentation for billing and insurance claims and reimbursement purposes. » Some health-insurance policies require you to get pre-authorization for medical treatment before seeking help. » Overseas visitors with travel health-insurance policies may need to contact a call center for an assessment by phone before getting medical treatment. » Carry any medications you may need in their original containers, clearly labeled. Bring a signed, dated letter from your doctor describing all medical conditions and medications (including generic names). Environmental Hazards ALTITUDE SICKNESS » Visitors from lower elevations undergo rather dramatic physiological changes as they adapt to high altitudes. » Symptoms, which tend to manifest during the first day after reaching altitude, may include headache, fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, sleeplessness, increased urination and hyperventilation due to overexertion. » Symptoms normally resolve within 24 to 48 hours. » The rule of thumb is, don’t ascend until the symptoms descend. » More severe cases may display extreme disorientation, ataxia (loss of coordination and balance), breathing problems (especially a persistent cough) and vomiting.


pages: 323 words: 111,561

Digging Up Mother: A Love Story by Doug Stanhope

call centre, false flag, index card, pre–internet, rent control, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer

It tasted almost tangential like it might have been left in the sun. You have to understand that I’m on a limited budget!” The complaints were absurd but it made Bingo laugh and customer service would only try to pretend to understand for so long before relenting and sending you coupons for free product. They don’t give a shit. They work in a call center and are happy enough that you’re not yelling at them. After two hours of doing this for the first time, we ended up collecting about $250 worth of free shit. Keep in mind that a lot of the coupons require the checkout person to fill in minutiae with a pen. We filled two carts full on that first 250 dollars, and it took us almost 45 minutes to check out.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

The arrangement legalized short-term rentals in primary residences but limited unhosted rentals—that is, when the host was not present—to ninety days a year.9 Registration fees were reduced from $4,000 to $180 and hosts were required to conduct a safety inspection of their homes, notify their neighbors, and register with the city. In return, Airbnb agreed to collect the 11.5 percent lodging tax on behalf of its hosts and send the revenue to the city (without including hosts’ names and addresses).10 The company also opened a customer-service call center in town. There was peace in Portland, but Steve Unger didn’t like it. “I believed that the ninety nights a year would be almost impossible to enforce unless Airbnb helped, and they never said they would,” he told me. “They said it was critical to have ninety nights a year as one of the conditions of the agreement.


pages: 549 words: 116,200

With a Little Help by Cory Efram Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton, Russell Galen

autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, death of newspapers, don't be evil, game design, Google Earth, high net worth, lifelogging, lolcat, margin call, Mark Shuttleworth, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, sensible shoes, skunkworks, Skype, traffic fines, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban planning, Y2K

Cook the diagnosis protocol, expand the number of people it catches. Get the news media whipped up about the anxiety epidemic. That's easy. Fear sells. An epidemic of fear? Christ, that'd be too easy. Far too easy. Get the insurers on board, discounts on the meds, make it cheaper to prescribe a course of treatment than to take the call-center time to explain to the guy why he's not getting the meds." 2466 "You're my kind of guy, Leon," Buhle said. "So yeah." 2467 "Yeah?" 2468 Another one of those we're-both-men-of-the-world smiles. "Yeah." 2469 Oh. 2470 "How many?" 2471 "That's the thing. We were trying it in a little market first.


pages: 484 words: 120,507

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler

barriers to entry, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, precautionary principle, Republic of Letters, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, trade route, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine

Nevertheless, in the 1990s the attempt was being made to retrain half of its Russian-language teachers to be competent in English; and in 2004 its prime minister, Tsakhia Elbegdorj (admittedly, a Harvard-educated man), announced that English would be substituted for Russian as the First foreign language in Mongolian schools. The explicit motivation of the government is economic, with aspirations to make Ulan Bator, the capital, some kind of center for outsourcing and call-center services, to be modeled on Singapore or India’s Bangalore.12 It remains to be seen if the aspirations can be translated into reality, but the idea is now rife that English is the natural choice for those seeking access to the world’s wealth. For such wealth seekers, there are some good omens. Singapore itself, though founded by the British in 1819, has a population 77 percent Chinese, the majority of the rest being speakers of Malay (14 percent) and Tamil (up to 8 percent).


pages: 429 words: 120,332

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

This definition will help me show how the offshore system is not just a colorful appendage at the fringes of the global economy but rather lies at its very center. I should also make a short point here about some confusion in the language. When I say “offshore,” I obviously am not referring to offshore oil drilling. I am also not talking about “offshoring,” which is what happens when a company moves a manufacturing plant or, say, a call center from the United States to India or China, perhaps to save on labor costs. When I say “offshore,” I am talking about the artificial movement or use of money across borders, and about the jurisdictions, commonly known as tax havens, that host and facilitate this activity. Once the money has escaped offshore, it is reclassified in an accountant’s ledger and it assumes a different identity—and that means, very often, that the forces of law and order will never find it.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

They had also left bits of computer malware waiting to explode, like land mines inside the network. Just as in the Sony attack, a “KillDisk” program had been used to wipe out hard drives—turning the computers at the utilities into a useless pile of metal, plastic, and mice. For good measure, a “call center” for customers to dial to report an outage was flooded with automated calls, to maximize frustration and anger. In the dry wording of one after-action report, “the outages were caused by the use of the control systems and their software through direct interaction by the adversary.” Translation: Not only had the computer systems been attacked, they had been controlled from afar, likely outside Ukraine’s borders.


pages: 374 words: 114,660

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

Globalization is a part of the story; the manufacture of many goods that used to be made in the United States by low-skilled workers has moved to poorer countries, and many companies have sent offshore jobs that used to be done domestically, including “back-office” work (like claims processing) and customer call centers. Legal and illegal immigration has also been blamed for downward pressure on low-skill wages, though such claims remain controversial, and some credible studies show that the effect is small. The rising cost of medical care has also been important; most employees receive health insurance as part of their overall compensation, and most research shows that increases in premiums ultimately come out of wages.16 Indeed, average wages have tended to do badly when health-care costs are rising most rapidly and to do better when health-care costs are rising more slowly.17 The share of GDP going to health care, only 5 percent in 1960, was 8 percent in the mid-1970s but had risen to nearly 18 percent by 2009.


pages: 410 words: 114,005

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

Instead of debating the questions, however, Fairbank and Morris tested them. They sent out 50,000 letters to randomly selected households with one color and 50,000 with another color, and then measured the relative profitability from the resulting groups. Then they tested different fonts, and different wording, and different scripts at their call centers.9 Every year since it was founded Capital One has run thousands of similar tests. They have turned the company into a “scientific laboratory where every decision about product design, marketing, channels of communication, credit lines, customer selection, collection policies, and cross-selling decisions could be subjected to systematic testing and using thousands of experiments.”10 As of 2015, Capital One was valued at around £45 billion.


pages: 366 words: 117,875

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

In the years since the favela’s collapse into violence, a thriving middle class has emerged; depending whom you believe, between a fifth and a third of the neighborhood’s population have “made it” enough to become homeowners. It remains a poor neighborhood, with most of its population employed informally as delivery drivers, domestic servants, builders, or call-center operators (there is little unemployment), and drug abuse remains a visible problem in some quarters. But there is a fundamental change now. The main street, once a strip of forlorn drinking establishments, now teems with furniture and appliance stores, restaurants, ice-cream parlors, and home-improvement outlets.


pages: 298 words: 43,745

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising by Jim Jansen

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, bounce rate, business intelligence, butterfly effect, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, data science, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, folksonomy, Future Shock, information asymmetry, information retrieval, intangible asset, inventory management, life extension, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine translation, megacity, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, PageRank, place-making, power law, price mechanism, psychological pricing, random walk, Schrödinger's Cat, sealed-bid auction, search costs, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, software as a service, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the market place, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

., are they really measuring the overall goals of your advertising effort, including things like customer lifetime value, attribution, and cross channel sales)? • Do your measures have credibility (i.e., are they measuring what they ought to be measuring, including catching all sales and intermarketing communication)? • Do your measures have reliability (i.e., they measuring all they should be, including things like returns, cancels, and call center spillover)? Conclusion In this chapter, we defined sponsored-search analytics, showing how it relates to market research. We discussed how it is grounded in the methodology of transaction log analysis and the concept of behaviorism. We also discussed the core concepts of behaviors, trace data, and the unobtrusive method, highlighting the inherent elements of sponsored search analytics.


pages: 440 words: 117,978

Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll

affirmative action, call centre, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, information security, John Markoff, Menlo Park, old-boy network, Paul Graham, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable

There were listings for Lang, Langhardt, Langheim, and Langheinecke, but not one Langman. Bum steer. Steve White relayed a message from Germany. The Germans had been doing their homework. Apparently, when the hacker called a phone, the German police had printed out that phone number. Eventually, they figured out who was involved, just by piecing together the web of phone calls centered on the hacker. Were the German authorities planning a simultaneous bust? Tymnet passed along a chilling message: “This is not a benign hacker. It is quite serious. The scope of the investigation is being extended. Thirty people are now working on this case. Instead of simply breaking into the apartments of one or two people, locksmiths are making keys to the houses of the hackers, and the arrests will be made when the hackers cannot destroy the evidence.


pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

When Berkeley Nutraceuticals, a company founded by Cincinnati entrepreneur Steven Warshak, began in 2001, it only had 15 employees. After a flood of advertising—including in Penthouse and Outside magazines, among other ads that boasted a “double your money back” guarantee—business was booming. By 2004, the company had grown to include a 24-hour call center and 1,500 employees—that year, it raked in $250 million in revenue. However, according to prosecutors, the entire operation was built not on the sale of these questionable pills, but rather, an auto-ship program. Customers who thought they were simply getting a sample pack were, in fact, signing up for a subscription of regular pills that was nearly impossible to shake.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

Let us think about that, as we contemplate turning mobility over to a cartel of tech firms who seek to make everything interconnected. Do we want to make getting from point A to point B something you do, not in a car, but in a device, that is, a portal to overlapping bureaucracies? Will we obligingly accept the same conceit of a “seamless user experience” that the poor souls at those call centers in Bangladesh are required to repeat as they work through a script that has nothing to do with your problem? Do we want to make the basic animal freedom of moving your body through space contingent on the competence of large organizations? Now, General Motors is a large organization as well. And they too make a product that is immensely complex.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

The pipeline companies disconnected from ESG to prevent the hack from spreading to their controls, an admission that an internet-based attack could migrate into the controls for the nation’s pipelines. A few months later, the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the nearby towns of North Andover and Andover, an hour northwest of Boston, went up in flames. Almost simultaneously, hundreds of calls lit up the 911 emergency call centers. Houses were spontaneously combusting, everywhere. In minutes the three fire departments had more houses burning down than they had fire trucks. They called for help from cities and towns all over eastern Massachusetts. Fire trucks raced up Interstate 495 in convoys escorted by the state police.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

The Private Sector Job Quality Index, a measure of how many jobs provide above-average income, has plunged since 1990; it suggests that well-paying jobs as a proportion of the total have already started to fall. Countries like India and the Philippines have seen a huge boom from business process outsourcing, creating comparatively high-paying jobs in places like call centers. It’s precisely this kind of work that will be targeted by automation. New jobs might be created in the long term, but for millions they won’t come quick enough or in the right places. At the same time, a jobs recession will crater tax receipts, damaging public services and calling into question welfare programs just as they are most needed.


pages: 831 words: 110,299

Lonely Planet Kauai by Lonely Planet, Adam Karlin, Greg Benchwick

call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Easter island, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Paradox of Choice, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, union organizing

$ less than $12 $$ $12–30 $$$ more than $30 Health AFor emergency medical assistance anywhere in Hawaii, call 911 or go directly to the emergency room (ER) of the nearest hospital. AFor nonemergencies, consider an urgent-care center or walk-in medical clinic. ASome insurance policies require you to get preauthorization for medical treatment from a call center before seeking help. Keep all medical receipts and documentation for claims reimbursement later. Health Insurance Kauaʻi is a long way from everywhere. Having a good travel health-insurance plan if you are not on a US policy would be helpful. US policies work here, but you may find you are out of network for much of your needs.


pages: 444 words: 118,393

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece by Ron Jeffries

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, business cycle, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, call centre, cloud computing, continuous integration, Conway's law, creative destruction, dark matter, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, Hacker News, industrial robot, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, Mars Rover, microservices, Minecraft, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, OSI model, peer-to-peer lending, platform as a service, power law, ransomware, revision control, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software is eating the world, source of truth, SQL injection, systems thinking, text mining, time value of money, transaction costs, Turing machine, two-pizza team, web application, zero day

When this incident happened, the self-service check-in kiosks, phone menus, and “channel partner” applications had been updated to use CF. Channel partner applications generate data feeds for big travel-booking sites. IVR and self-service check-in are both used to put passengers on airplanes—“butts in seats,” in the vernacular. The development schedule had plans for new releases of the gate agent and call center applications to transition to CF for flight lookup, but those had not been rolled out yet. This turned out to be a good thing, as you’ll soon see. The architects of CF were well aware of how critical it would be to the business. They built it for high availability. It ran on a cluster of J2EE application servers with a redundant Oracle 9i database.


Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

(My message recommendation to the first manufacturer who produces a truly hassle-free computer: “Plug it in. Turn it on. Go.” ) We are livid when the instructions for setting up our audio system read like the disarmament codes for a North Korean nuclear bomb and are seemingly translated by someone who counted English as their third language. We don’t appreciate being switched to a call center in India when our appliance breaks down and someone named “Bob” can’t explain how to fix it. It’s often enlightening to look at the etymologies of words and see where they came from. “Hassle” originally meant “to hack or saw at.” I’d say that sums it up nicely. We don’t want to have to hack and saw away at things—we want them to be like butter under a hot knife.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

A customer can pick up and put down whatever they like, then simply walk out of the store, having paid for only what they took with them. In the future, this sort of tracking system will be used to reproduce these users, in real time, as digital twins. Technologies such as Google’s Starline might simultaneously allow workers to be “present” in the store (potentially from an offshore “Metaverse call center”), jumping across different screens to help the customer. Hyper-detailed projection cameras will also play a part, enabling virtual objects, worlds, and avatars to be transplanted into the real world and in realistic detail. Key to these projections are various sensors that enable the cameras to scan and understand the non-flat, non-perpendicular landscapes they will project against, and alter their projection accordingly so that it appears undistorted to the viewer.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

“We can only absorb, on average, two or perhaps occasionally three new people per month without creating more chaos and disruption than I deem advisable,” he wrote. In October, Michael Toy presented Kapor with a surprise resignation. Some friends were starting a new software venture to streamline the business of call centers, allowing workers to take calls from their homes, and move it all to the Web. They had offered him the chance to be a vice president. Though he had thought of OSAF as a dream job, he was surprised to find himself drawn to the job offer. Although Toy’s self-disparaging comments had always seemed an endearing part of his personality—one week the task list he publicly posted read, “Continue in my more focused attempt to talk to people who I am allegedly helping by being their manager”—it turned out that he honestly felt he hadn’t been doing a very good job.


pages: 435 words: 127,403

Panderer to Power by Frederick Sheehan

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California energy crisis, call centre, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, place-making, Ponzi scheme, price stability, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, VA Linux, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

United States District Court for the District of Columbia, September 15, 2006. 65“In His Own Words,” New York Times, July 15, 2004. 66 FOMC meeting transcript, December 10, 2002, p. 16. The efficiency gains were comparable to Henry Ford’s assembly line: “With small staffs, the companies typically sell their software to home lenders with vast networks of call centers employing hundreds of thousands of loan officers. Some big Wall Street banks and housing lenders bought the software, then developed their own systems.”69 The Times quoted Scott Berry, executive vice president, artificial intelligence (that was his actual title) at Countrywide: “Without the technology, there is no way we would have been able to do the amount of business that we did and continue to do.”70 The stripping of the standards reduced the frictional costs of trading houses: a report from the West Coast in 2002 stated: “At Californiabased Countrywide Credit, owners with existing 30-year loans at around 7% have been able to refinance at 6% without paying a dime in closing costs—‘nirvana for homeowners,’ [said] Countrywide chief executive Angelo Mozilo.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

The American Bankers Association (ABA) claims that the cost of opening an account runs between $150 and $200, and the annual cost of maintaining an account runs between $250 and $300. The American Bankers Association catalogs the costs of maintaining an account: “These costs reflect the expense of processing transactions, providing monthly statements, investing in payment system technology and software, paying the cost of tellers, ATMs, and online banking, staffing call centers, complying with countless regulations, ensuring privacy and data protection, and preventing fraud and covering fraud losses.” Marcie Geffner, “Bank Account Costs $250,” Bankrate, July 26, 2010, accessed March 17, 2015, www.bankrate.com/financing/banking/bank-account-costs-250/. 11. Mark Maremont and Tom McGinty, “Why Banks at Wal-Mart Are among America’s Top Fee Collectors,” Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2014, accessed March 17, 2015, www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304734304579515730198367754?


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

In all, some $43 million in aid passed through mobile donation platforms, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation, which builds the technical infrastructure many NGOs used. Télécoms Sans Frontières, a humanitarian organization that specializes in emergency telecommunications, deployed on the ground in Haiti one day after the earthquake to establish call centers to allow families to reach loved ones. And just five days after the earthquake, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s AlertNet humanitarian news service set up the Emergency Information Service, the first of its kind, which allowed Haitians free SMS alert messages to help them navigate the disaster’s impact.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

In decades past, Henry Dreyfuss and his peers had ridden a manufacturing wave that flooded homes across the world in new products. Now IDEO and a new breed of design studio rode atop a silicon revolution, putting screens and gadgets in places they’d never been before. Sometimes, that was in our own homes, with VCRs and personal computers. More often, it was in the unseen places of commercial progress, such as call centers and warehouses and offices. Software, which transformed dumb objects into objects that were always changing, had presented new problems. “We were working on making complex products easy to use,” says Brown. “And if we were doing simple products, it was in the context of the future.” Those products had a memory of their own, about what the user had done and about what they had been before—granted, just a few seconds before, usually.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Manufacturing as a share of American gross domestic product has dropped to its lowest level in more than seventy years.35 Over the past four decades, more than seven million American manufacturing jobs were lost36—over a third of the entire manufacturing workforce—including five million just since 2000.37 Onetime American hardware giants like Lucent, Motorola, and General Electric have disappeared or seen their global dominance eroded. From 2000 to 2010, more than 66,000 manufacturing facilities closed down or moved overseas. Apple’s Elk Grove plant is now an AppleCare call center.38 The decline in manufacturing has hit the industrial Midwest particularly hard. I remember driving through my father’s hometown of Toledo on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis. All along Main Street, eviscerated storefronts bore the scars of a hollowed-out community. For Sale and For Rent signs were everywhere.


pages: 513 words: 141,153

The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History by David Enrich

Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Downton Abbey, eat what you kill, electricity market, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, performance metric, profit maximization, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, tulip mania, work culture , zero-sum game

Tall and with muttonchop sideburns, Ewan played the guitar and loved the theater. But his real passion was traveling. While classmates and then colleagues hewed to the well-beaten path, Ewan trekked to Borneo and Costa Rica for vacations where he could hone his scuba-diving skills. But he had to find a way to pay the bills. His first job out of college was working in the call center of a large investment firm near his hometown, answering the phones as customers rang with questions and complaints. A year later, in 1998, he joined the Financial Times Stock Exchange group, a London provider of financial indices known in the finance industry as FTSE (pronounced FOOT-see). After five years there, working as an administrator, Ewan quit in 2003 to fulfill a lifelong dream of traveling around the world.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

A journey-to-work could originate at any one of the region’s 1.9 million homes, and finish in any one of thousands of office parks or shopping centers. Not that there are many jobs to drive to: most employment in Phoenix, which lacks a robust indigenous economy, is low-paying assembly-plant and call-center work. “Basically, Phoenix is a production town,” said Butler. “Companies have operations here, but no head offices.” As in many Sun Belt cities, Phoenix’s economy thrived as long as the subdivisions kept going up. Developers, mostly from Southern California, built such enormous master-planned developments as McCormick Ranch, Sun City, and The Lakes.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

There’s this rover on Mars that is taking pictures and sending them back to JPL to process and assess what else they want pictures of and where they want the rover to go. And that’s all done on AWS. The Obama campaign used AWS, and over 18 months built 200 applications. On election day they built a call center, they built an elaborate database to know where their volunteers were, know the neighborhoods where people appeared not to have voted, so they could go knock on doors and get out the vote,” Andy Jassy, head of Amazon Web Services, told All Things Digital. “Nine Questions for Andy Jassy, Head of Amazon Web Services,” All Things Digital, November 8, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20170528161820/http://allthingsd.com/20131108 /nine-questions-for-andy-jassy-head-of-amazon-web-services/comment-page-1/. 136.


pages: 442 words: 135,006

ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, call centre, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kinder Surprise, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

If not them, then the town councillor who just approved the new pedestrian zones, and who gets his coke free in exchange for favors. The parking lot attendant who’s happy now only when he’s high. The architect who renovated your vacation home, the mailman who just delivered your new ATM card. If not them, then the woman at the call center who asks “How may I help you?” in that shrill, happy voice, the same for every caller, thanks to the white powder. If not her, your professor’s research assistant—coke makes him nervous. Or the physiotherapist who’s trying to get your knee working right. Coke makes him more sociable. The forward who just scored, spoiling the bet you were winning right up until the final minutes of the game.


pages: 453 words: 130,632

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, airport security, British Empire, call centre, corporate social responsibility, Edward Snowden, global pandemic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, period drama, Peter Thiel, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, stem cell, TED Talk, time dilation

He delights that he lives in rented accommodation, that behind his fame he is humble and real, just as his eyes behind his VIP glasses have perfect vision. His lack of college is an accidental advantage. “If I’m educated,” he told a documentary maker, “maybe my mind will be crumpled into a fixed concept, nothing but running after money.” To another reporter he says that if he had stayed in school, he would be working in a call center by now. Jayaashree is not a charity: he claims he has never accepted a dollar in donations. He is a businessman, but a particular kind. He has socialized his machine, he says. It does good but it also makes money. Profit means replication and sustainability. The machine costs $1,000 to $3,000, depending on how far it must be shipped.


pages: 455 words: 133,719

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

In addition to a culture that allows for informal flexibility for workers to get to doctors’ appointments or school visits, the company’s Flex-Friendly policy gives each employee the right to request a formal alternate work schedule—just like workers are allowed to do by law in the United Kingdom and other countries—and even provides a ready-made template to make it easy for employees to do so. Software that finally is sophisticated enough to protect financial transactions through encryption, even when conducted on home computers, has enabled companies like TeleTech to “homeshore” call center jobs that had been going overseas and bring them into American homes. Now the company has more than five thousand employees who work out of their houses, called “at-home associates,” many of them military spouses, mothers reentering the workforce, and seniors, all of whom set their own hours. “We offer a true alternative to people who don’t have the ability to get in a car and drive to a fixed location every day,” CEO Judi Hand told me.12 Internal surveys at BDO Financial Services found that a majority of employees felt conflicted between their work and home demands, and that those feeling the most stress, interestingly, were not mothers, as everyone assumed, but fathers and employees with no children.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

The story of software group Infosys became the stuff of particular corporate legend, as a group of middle-class engineers, supposedly with just a few hundred dollars in start-up capital, managed to build a world-beating company based in Bangalore, the southern city that became India’s technology hub. Founded in the early 1980s, Infosys came of age after liberalization. Alongside a handful of other big IT businesses, it helped to craft a new image of India as a land of pioneering start-ups and vast call centers. Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani, the company’s best-known cofounders, were admired as models of social mobility and ethical practice, as well as being among India’s first tech billionaires. It was a throwaway phrase by Nilekani—“Tom, the playing field is being levelled”—that inspired American journalist Thomas Friedman to write The World Is Flat, his breathless 2005 opus hailing a new era of global capitalism.20 Infosys’s successes encouraged a new generation too.


pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Since the late 1980s, commentators have filled columns and airwaves with glib chatter about globalization, as if it were merely a matter of bits and bytes and corporate cost-cutting. Since The Box appeared, however, many news stories and articles have acknowledged that, digital communication notwithstanding, the integration of the world economy depends less on call centers and trans-Pacific exports of technical services than on the ability to move goods cheaply from here to there. The Box, I hope, has contributed to public understanding that inadequate port, road, and rail infrastructure can cause economic harm by raising the cost of moving freight. Many aspects of the response to The Box were startling, but perhaps the most unexpected concerns a widespread stereotype about innovation.


pages: 465 words: 134,575

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, desegregation, edge city, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, moral panic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

In the five years leading up to the creation of ODALE, the primary federal drug enforcement agency, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, had carried out four no-knock search warrants. In its first six months, ODALE carried out over one hundred. Ambrose even set up a national “heroin hotline” that citizens could call to give tips on heroin dealers. The call center was run out of a Virginia mine shaft that at one time had been a possible destination for high-ranking government officials in the event of a nuclear attack on America. Ambrose was able to get half the staff of the federal Office of Emergency Preparedness transferred to ODALE—to answer phones on the heroin hotline.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Lonely singles seeking matrimony often mention the NIIT degree as a credential in personals ads.25 India’s famous success at outsourcing IT services for the U.S. market is exemplified by Wipro Ltd., India’s most valuable company, at over ten billion dollars in market capitalization.26 The company provides IT services to 138 of the Fortune 1000 and Global 500 companies, including such famous names as Sony, Nokia, Home Depot, and Compaq. It also runs call centers for the likes of Delta Airlines.27 This is pretty impressive for an obscure company founded in 1945 as a maker of edible oils. The owner of Wipro, Azim Premji, with a B.A. from Stanford, is the fifty-eighth richest billionaire in the world.28 Turkey I met Fatma two days after September 11, 2001.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Bertolini had started an internal blog by which he communicated with employees (another thing that nobody is taught to do in business school—executives are supposed to stay in their silos) and quickly began receiving many complaints from workers about how they found it difficult to live and work on the wages and benefits that they were receiving. Bertolini asked managers for more information about these workers, many of whom were on the front lines of customer service in call centers, and discovered to his surprise that basic economic data about the workforce either wasn’t being tallied or wasn’t readily available. Despite all the spreadsheets being used to calculate costs and profits, nobody knew much about the people who made up Aetna’s business. Thus ensued a yearlong journey of data collection.


pages: 524 words: 143,596

The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

bread and circuses, call centre, East Village, fear of failure, impulse control, land reform, Lao Tzu, Socratic dialogue, the medium is the message

His papers and books on dice theory and therapy have scandalized the psychiatric world, and his readings from The Book of the Die have scandalized the religious world. He has earned from the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists a Special Condemnation. Nevertheless, many individuals have rallied round Dr. Rhinehart and his religion, some of them not in mental hospitals. Last year Dr. Rhinehart and his followers began opening Dice Centers called Centers for Experiments in Totally Random Environments and thousands of people have gone through these centers, some reporting deeply religious experiences, but others suffering severe breakdowns. No matter how opinions differ, all agree that Dr. Rhinehart is a very controversial man. `Dr. Rhinehart, I'd like to open our discussion by asking you our central question for today, and then asking each of our other guests to comment on the same thing: "Is your religion of the Die a Cop-out?"


Fodor's Normandy, Brittany & the Best of the North With Paris by Fodor's

call centre, car-free, carbon tax, flag carrier, glass ceiling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, subprime mortgage crisis, urban planning, young professional

Phones The good news is that you can now make a direct-dial telephone call from virtually any point on earth. The bad news? You may pay dearly for the convenience. Calling from a hotel is almost always the most expensive option; hotels usually add huge surcharges to all calls, particularly international ones. In some countries you can phone from call centers or even the post office. Calling cards usually keep costs to a minimum, but only if you purchase them locally. And then there are mobile phones (below), which are sometimes more prevalent—particularly in the developing world—than landlines; as expensive as mobile phone calls can be, they are still usually a much cheaper option than calling from your hotel.


pages: 458 words: 135,206

CTOs at Work by Scott Donaldson, Stanley Siegel, Gary Donaldson

Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, distributed generation, do what you love, domain-specific language, functional programming, glass ceiling, Hacker News, hype cycle, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, Pluto: dwarf planet, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, systems thinking, thinkpad, web application, zero day, zero-sum game

And there are going to be hundreds, thousands of apps like my daughter writes that access their APIs. They're losing control of their interface. And I don't think they fully realize that. If you think about the web revolution, it really was a different kind of user interface. It stopped being people in call centers, so terminals started being browsers, but the app developer still controlled the user interface. Sorry, this isn't the case anymore; this interface control is gone. As soon as you surface HTML/HTTP, you have effectively provided a REST interface and any guy can build an iPhone app and put it in the app store that takes over your interface.


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

In my own polling firm, we’ve eliminated our East Coast phone banks that used to house our callers, in favor of Stay-at-Home Workers. It’s not only easier for them, but I can get more people willing to call consumers in Japan—at 3 a.m. New York time—if they can do it from their apartments instead of from my call center. Eventually, all polling interviews will be done this way. So while Stay-at-Home Workers haven’t transformed all of industry—as was once predicted—this seriously growing group of people who work in their slippers has important implications for business and policy. First, Stay-at-Homers need a way to build community.


Jennifer Morgue by Stross, Charles

Boeing 747, call centre, Carl Icahn, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, disintermediation, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, Etonian, haute couture, interchangeable parts, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, operational security, PalmPilot, planetary scale, RFID, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, stem cell, telepresence, traveling salesman, Turing machine

Eileen isn't distracted: "She has something to do with your employers," she informs me. "This is the monitoring hub." She pats the monitor. Some imp of the perverse tickles her ego, or maybe it's the geas. "Here you see the filtered take from my intelligence queue. Most of the material that comes in is rubbish, and filtering it is a big overhead; I've got entire call centers in Mumbai and Bangalore trawling the inputs from the similarity grid, looking for eyes that are watching interesting things, forwarding them to the Hopper for further analysis, and finally funneling them to me here on the Mabuse. Computer screens and keyboards where the owners are entering passwords, mostly.


pages: 452 words: 134,502

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

They are easy to bootstrap, create remarkable efficiencies, optimize the value of scarce resources, and cost very little to promote. Like most of these networks, Foursquare was built on open source software and its services are delivered over the Internet. They were able to grow to over one hundred thousand users on less than $25,000. Craigslist radically reduced the cost of classified advertising. They replaced the call centers, printing presses, trucks and trees that used to be necessary to alert the world that you wanted to sell your couch—with a digital photo and a drop-dead simple electronic posting mechanism. Airbnb has re-invented the way travelers are matched with beds, and in the process enabled hundreds of thousands of people around the world to capture the value in their spare bedroom.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

Such flaws in code can certainly also happen with any closed source software, such as all of our electronic medical record systems (like EPIC, Cerner, Allscripts), which are used throughout US hospitals and health information systems. An in-depth investigation of cybersecurity status of US hospitals and health care organizations—with interrogation of medical devices and software, including virtual private networks, firewalls, call centers, radiology imaging software, CCTVs, and routers—led to the conclusion that the state of medical cybersecurity was “appalling” and “alarming,” “an illustration of how far behind the healthcare industry had fallen.” The report cited inadequate current legislation, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, for setting standards of security for healthcare entities.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

• Products produced include military gear, police uniforms (ironically), Victoria’s Secret lingerie, furniture, dentures, Microsoft software packaging, Walmart products, and McDonald’s uniforms. • Yearly sales revenue of $500,000,000 worth of prison manufactured items.112 • The prisons also market inmate services like call centers, dog training, data entry, and were also used to clean up after the BP oil spill. Heinrich Himmler would be impressed with the United States’ network of forced labor camps. The only thing missing is the Typhus. This business model of using inmate labor in private prisons, is amazingly beneficial to the companies like CCA and The Geo Group, the largest private operators of for-profit prisons in the United States, and, not surprisingly, incredibly unfair to the prisoners.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Purohit, “Coronavirus: India’s Outsourcing Firms Struggle to Serve US, British Companies amid Lockdown,” South China Morning Post, March 31, 2020. S. Phartiyal and S. Ravikumar, “India’s Huge Outsourcing Industry Struggles with Work-from-Home Scenario,” Reuters, March 25, 2020. L. Frayer and S. Pathak, “India’s Lockdown Puts Strain on Call Centers,” NPR, April 24, 2020. 17. A. Tanzi, “Half the Labor Force in Major U.S. Cities Is Working from Home,” Bloomberg, November 24, 2020. K. Weise, “Pushed by Pandemic, Amazon Goes on a Hiring Spree Without Equal,” New York Times, November 27, 2020. “FedEx Tries to Think Beyond the Pandemic,” Economist, July 2, 2020. 18.


pages: 491 words: 131,769

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Globalization has gone hand in hand with technological innovation, each reinforcing the other. For example, financial capital now moves around the world at a much faster pace thanks to the widespread adoption of information technology. As a result, countries can now provide services to other countries on the other side of the world: think of India’s call centers, for example, and the outsourcing of U.S. white-collar jobs. Likewise, China has been able to join complicated supply chains that stretch around the globe. Increasingly, countries on the economic periphery are connected to advanced economies and vice versa. Globalization has brought a sharp increase in the standard of living in emerging economies.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Its daunting size struck him when Google lawyers called to alert him to new compliance measures required because these payments were becoming material to Google’s daily revenue. All these YouTubers needed systems to track money flow and the site’s frequent updates. Other companies might set up a call center or hire teams devoted to managing broadcasters. Not Google. “The Google way of solving problems is to throw machines at them, not people,” said Stack. A team of engineers created a computer system to address needs without having to involve a phone call or a human. But machines could leave creators in a lurch.


pages: 526 words: 144,019

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

He would be taking off just as the NYSE was opening. Rubinstein decided that he would take a later flight and meet up with Leland at LOR’s offices in the First Interstate Tower. He thought his colleague was overreacting but trusted his instincts. * * * THE LARGELY INSTITUTIONAL rout of the previous week was rapidly becoming a public panic. Call centers at some major mutual fund houses and discount brokerage offices were ominously busy all weekend. At the scattered branch offices of Charles Schwab, a household name thanks to its national advertising, customers were getting incessant busy signals all through Saturday. The “phones were melting down,” one account noted, “but 99 percent of the calls that did go through were orders to sell.”


pages: 1,758 words: 342,766

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices) by Steve McConnell

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, continuous integration, data acquisition, database schema, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, General Magic , global macro, Grace Hopper, haute cuisine, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Menlo Park, no silver bullet, off-by-one error, Perl 6, place-making, premature optimization, revision control, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, slashdot, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, statistical model, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, web application

Here's a possible solution to the New York City telephone code problem, with the programming language changed from C++ to Java to show the labeled break: Example 16-22. Java Example of a Better Use of a Labeled break Statement Within a do-switch-if Block do { ... switch ... CALL_CENTER_DOWN: if () { ... break CALL_CENTER_DOWN; <-- 1 ... } ... } while ( ... ); (1)The target of the labeled break is unambiguous. Use break and continue only with caution. Use of break eliminates the possibility of treating a loop as a black box. Limiting yourself to only one statement to control a loop's exit condition is a powerful way to simplify your loops.


Hawaii Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, bike sharing, British Empire, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Easter island, Food sovereignty, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, Kula ring, land reform, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, Silicon Valley, tech billionaire

Health For emergency medical assistance anywhere in Hawaii, call 911 or go directly to the emergency room (ER) of the nearest hospital. For nonemergencies, consider an urgent-care center or walk-in medical clinic. Some insurance policies require you to get preauthorization for medical treatment from a call center before seeking help. Keep all medical receipts and documentation for claims reimbursement later. VOG Vog, a visible haze or smog caused by volcanic emissions from the Big Island, is often (but not always) dispersed by trade winds before it reaches other islands. On the Big Island, vog can make sunny skies hazy in West Hawaiʻi, especially in the afternoons around Kailua-Kona.

Some insurance policies do not cover 'risky' activities such as scuba diving, trekking and motorcycling, so read the fine print. Make sure your policy at least covers hospital stays and an emergency flight home. Some insurance policies require you to get preauthorization before receiving medical treatment – contact their call center. Keep your medical receipts and documentation for claims reimbursement later. Paying for your airline ticket or rental car with a credit card may provide limited travel accident insurance. For car-rental insurance information, see Click here. If you already have private US health insurance or a homeowners or renters policy, find out what those policies cover and only get supplemental insurance.


pages: 525 words: 142,027

CIOs at Work by Ed Yourdon

8-hour work day, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fail fast, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Googley, Grace Hopper, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, Julian Assange, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Zipcar

Blalock: In many cases, the system is self-healing and can automatically switch the flow of power to keep some customers from going out. Instead of 200, like I said, it would only take a few homes down until you can get a truck to the location. And the trucks are equipped with analytics, as well. They receive information about the exact location of the outage to save time. In addition, the analytics can be shared with out call center. The customers don’t even have to call us. We can call them and say, “A pole in your area has been damaged. Crews are on site and repair should be complete soon.” All of that is coming in the very near future. And the other thing is that in the future there will be a lot more distributed generation.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

They need the government to provide a safety net to assure that their families have access to good health care, that no one goes hungry when shifts in the economy or temporary setbacks take away their jobs, and that they get help to rebuild after a hurricane or other disaster. They need the government to assure a safe workplace and a living minimum wage. They need mass transit systems that work and call centers at Social Security offices that don’t produce busy signals. They need the government to keep the political system fair and protect it from domination by those who can give politicians the most money. They need the government to provide fair labor laws and to promote an economy and a tax code that tempers the extremes of income inequality and makes economic opportunity more than an empty cliché.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

“Talent truly is evenly distributed, or at least the aptitude to do this work is evenly distributed,” he notes. One woman I spoke to who’d been working at Catalyte for two years, Carolina Erickson, was 35 and had studied music performance in college, trying for years to make a living as a flute player before concluding that she wasn’t going to make it. Working part-time in tech call centers revived an old interest in web development, so she took a college course in it; then she came across Catalyte, she passed the test, and was hired. She’s worked on teams there that helped revamp parts of the ticketing system and the iOS app for StubHub. Erickson suspected that second-career coders had some advantages that fresh-out-of-school computer science grads didn’t, including a lot of experience working on teams.


pages: 517 words: 147,591

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro, Vestal Mcintyre

basic income, call centre, centre right, classic study, clean water, confounding variable, crowdsourcing, data science, demand response, drone strike, experimental economics, failed state, George Akerlof, Google Earth, guns versus butter model, HESCO bastion, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, Internet of things, iterative process, land reform, mandatory minimum, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, natural language processing, operational security, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, statistical model, the scientific method, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

Iraqi insurgent groups had responded to the establishment of tips hotlines by flooding them with illegitimate calls (more indirect evidence that they viewed tips as a threat). A 2006 New York Times article reported that in an apparent “effort by the insurgency to tie up the lines,” prank callers attempted to overwhelm call center operators by “berat[ing] and threaten[ing them]. Women called to offer the operators sex or, they said, just to chat.”44 Internal U.S. government documents from the time confirm that while calls to hotlines exceeded 5,000 per day, three-quarters were death threats or made simply to harass.45 The situation was as bad or worse in Basra specifically.


pages: 629 words: 142,393

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Alternately known as constructionism or constructivism, Papert’s vision of education downplays drills in hard facts and abstract skills in favor of a model that teaches students how to learn by asking them to undertake projects that they find relevant to their everyday lives.4 A modest incarnation of the OLPC project would distribute PCs as electronic workbooks. The PCs would run the consumer operating systems and applications prevailing in the industrialized world—the better to groom students for work in call centers and other outsourced IT-based industries. Microsoft, under competition from free operating systems, has shown a willingness to greatly reduce the prices for its products in areas where wallets are smaller, so such a strategy is not necessarily out of reach, and in any case the XO machine could run one of the more consumer-friendly versions of free Linux without much modification.5 But the XO completely redesigns today’s user interfaces from the ground up.


pages: 489 words: 148,885

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

Portrait of a wasted youth: Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his income for the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two-bedroom housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren't needed on the end of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in the Festival season – but humans aren't in demand for shelf stacking either, these days.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

In 2011, Hewlett-Packard analyzed employee data to predict who was likely to leave the company, then informed their managers. Workplace surveillance is another area of enormous potential harm. For many of us, our employer is the most dangerous power that has us under surveillance. Employees who are regularly surveilled include call center workers, truck drivers, manufacturing workers, sales teams, retail workers, and others. More of us have our corporate electronic communications constantly monitored. A lot of this comes from a new field called “workplace analytics,” which is basically surveillance-driven human resources management.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

The mortgage business is highly complex, with different regulations governing the fifty states and their approximately three thousand counties. Gilbert says the business requires “intestinal fortitude” to survive. One of his methods has been to break away from the reliance on third-party referrals and appeal directly to consumers. He drummed up business with radio and TV commercials and substituted a central call center for costly satellite offices. The Internet was the perfect medium for Gilbert: He admits that although he could have been very successful pursuing business via 800 numbers and commercials, the Internet—and Rockloans.com—took his vision of appealing directly to consumers to another level. Better still for Gilbert, Rock Financial and its online operation was the perfect target for bigger companies swept up in the dot-com frenzy.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

Overture continued the boasting at the Direct Marketing Association conference in Chicago later that month. I was in our small booth off to one side of the large hall, which overflowed with direct-mail houses, list brokers, specialty printers, and foreign governments offering low taxes and cheap labor for call centers. We were handing out magnets and t-shirts and riding our Googlized scooter around the floor promoting a contest for free ads. We stood out from the conservative coat-and-tie crowd, members of which came by to tell us again and again, "I love Google!" The only booth generating more interest was staffed by Hooters waitresses handing out free chicken wings as the Bears game played on a big-screen TV.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Hussam, Reshmaan, Atonu Rabbani, Giovanni Regianni, and Natalia Rigol, “Habit Formation and Rational Addiction: A Field Experiment in Handwashing,” Harvard Business School BGIE Unit Working Paper 18-030, 2017. 27 Avraham Ebenstein, Maoyong Fan, Michael Greenstone, Guojun He, and Maigeng Zhou, “New Evidence on the Impact of Sustained Exposure to Air Pollution on Life Expectancy from China’s Huai River Policy,” PNAS 114, no. 39 (2017): 10384–89. 28 WHO Global Ambient Air Quality Database (update 2018), https://www.who.int/airpollution/data/cities/en/. 29 Umair Irfan, “How Delhi Became the Most Polluted City on Earth,” Vox, November 25, 2017. 30 “The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health,” Lancet 391 (2017): 462–512. 31 “The Lancet: Pollution Linked to Nine Million Deaths Worldwide in 2015, Equivalent to One in Six Deaths,” Lancet, public release, 2018. 32 Achyuta Adhvaryu, Namrata Kala, and Anant Nyshadham, “Management and Shocks to Worker Productivity: Evidence from Air Pollution Exposure in an Indian Garment Factory,” IGC working paper, 2016, accessed June 16, 2019, https://www.theigc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Adhvaryu-et-al-2016-Working-paper.pdf. 33 Tom Y. Chang, Joshua Graff Zivin, Tal Gross, and Matthew Neidell, “The Effect of Pollution on Worker Productivity: Evidence from Call Center Workers in China,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11, no. 1 (2019): 151–72. 34 A short-lived “odd-even” restriction, where cars with license plates ending in odd and even numbers were allowed out on alternate days led to a decline in particulate matter, but was brought down by a cabal of irate elites and environmental experts with “better” plans.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

In any case, the large-scale replacement of U.S. workers and jobs with cheaper workers abroad essentially finished a decade ago, when the fraction of Americans working in factories dropped below 10 percent and for practical purposes there were hardly any more jobs to offshore. Likewise, starting in the 1990s, white-collar work was moved overseas (such as customer service jobs in call centers) but also increasingly rendered obsolete by digital technology, as the careers for Americans in music and newspapers and travel booking and tax preparation and video rental and other retail businesses came to dead ends. Economic efficiency wins, by whatever means. In the first decade of the new century, another 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs went pfffft even though more stuff was actually being manufactured in the United States.


Discover Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bartolomé de las Casas, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, food miles, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, urban decay, urban sprawl

Telephone Remember that you must dial 1 + 809 or 829 for all calls within the DR, even local ones. Toll-free numbers have 200 for their prefix (not the area code). The easiest way to make a phone call in the DR is to pay per minute (average rates to USA US$0.20, to Europe US$0.50) at a Codetel Centro de Comunicaciones (Codetel) call center or an internet cafe. Phonecards can be used at public phones. Local SIM cards can be used or cell phones can be set for roaming. There are GSM-suitable networks. Visas The majority of foreign travelers do not need a visa. Getting There & Away Entering the Dominican Republic All foreign visitors must have a valid passport.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

” said Holly Sullivan at the conference in 2019. “We were increasingly getting the feeling that we didn’t.” But one of the specific breaking points, of course, was the talk of unions, which had triggered the same reaction from Jeff Bezos and his colleagues that they had exhibited across the entire arc of Amazon history—at a Seattle call center in 2000, at German fulfillment centers in 2013, and soon, in France, at the start of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic. In all those cases, when talk of unionization and worker strikes came up, Amazon either tamped down on growth plans in the region, temporarily shut things down, or walked away from a site altogether.


Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

The Russian security establishment effectively kept collection and release within the intelligence community, but outsourced the noisy and cheap business of driving wedges through social media to dedicated third-party service providers. The Internet Research Agency, the best-known and prime example, worked more like a spammy call center than a tight intelligence agency, with limited operational security, very limited presence on the ground in its target area, and no known operational coordination with Russian intelligence. The IRA’s social media accounts did not amplify leaks in a meaningful way; the trolls did not mention CyberCaliphate, there were no noteworthy mentions of CyberGuerrilla, and they had no advance knowledge of ongoing GRU active measures.39 The IRA was the least effective component of the overall Russian disinformation effort in 2016, despite the breathless press coverage and congressional committee hearings with social media executives in 2017 and 2018.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Either the employee is satisfied with the gibberish and processes the hacker’s request or repeats the security question. The hacker then mutters the answer again. After several rounds, the employee gives up in frustration and processes the request anyway. In his version of the attack, Cameron would call up AOL customer service and ask representatives, who often worked from a call center in India or Mexico and had less training than their American counterparts, for a password reset. When asked for the last four numbers of his credit card number, Cameron would mumble them. The representatives usually reset the password. Cameron also catfished an AOL employee. He pretended to be a teenage girl and engaged in flirtatious conversation.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In the early days of Internet commercialization, I had the opportunity to visit QVC, the granddaddy of television shopping, which was looking to build an online equivalent. Three rotating soundstages held products and the hosts who sold them to viewers by describing them in glowing terms. Immediately facing the stage was an analyst with a giant computer workstation, monitoring call volume and sales from each of the company’s call centers in real time, giving the signal to switch to the next product only when attention and sales fell off. I was told that hosts were hired for their ability to talk nonstop about the virtues of a pencil for at least fifteen minutes. That’s the face of social media with engagement as its fitness function.


pages: 684 words: 173,622

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Albert Einstein, call centre, Columbine, hydroponic farming, Jeff Hawkins, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

The doctors were unable to reattach his finger. After that, Daniel was sent to the sales division of Bridge Publications. Sales had been declining since The Basics had first been published in 2007. The Basics included eighteen books and a number of Hubbard lectures on CD; the complete package cost $6,500. Sea Orgs all over the world had call centers set up to sell them. In Los Angeles, there were hourly quotas to be met, and those who failed suffered various punishments, such as having water dumped on their head or being made to do push-ups or run up and down the stairs. There were security guards on every floor. A salesperson had to get a slip verifying that he had made his quota before he was permitted to go to bed.


pages: 565 words: 164,405

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

As predicted by Stolper-Samuelson, this issue cleaves the nation along the abundant-scarce factor fault line: among those earning more than $100,000 per year, only one-third agreed, whereas among bluecollar workers and union members, two-thirds agreed.22 Stolper-Samuelson does fail in at least one area by predicting that freer trade should decrease inequalities in developing nations by helping low-skilled workers. In fact, the opposite occurs: the most highly skilled industrial workers earn better pay in call centers and multinational-owned plants, increasing the gap between those who are fortunate enough to find such work and those who are not.23 Although working conditions in an Asian Nike factory may appall people in the developed world, positions in American-associated factories are the most sought-after jobs in Vietnam's "development zones."


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

As American firms send their “back office” work to India, so European companies are turning to Eastern European countries for their number crunching and bookkeeping. In a new development, India’s offshore specialists have begun hiring thousands of Americans to help them compete for higher-end work in technological services. Indians want to move up the white-collar ladder. The importance of these call centers to India can be gleaned from the predominance of work in the service sector of the economy. While the actual number of farmers has declined steadily to 24 percent of the population, the percentage of those in service work has grown to 50 percent. By comparison, China has become the world’s factory with almost 50 percent of its workers in industry.


Fodor's Barcelona by Fodor's

Albert Einstein, call centre, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, low cost airline, market design, Suez canal 1869, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Cafe Internet Navego (Provença 546, Eixample | 08025 | 93/436–8459). Easy Internet Café (Rambla 31, Rambla | 08002 | 93/268–8787). Phones Calling from a hotel is almost always the most expensive option; hotels usually add huge surcharges to all calls. In some countries you can phone from call centers or even the post office. Calling cards usually keep costs to a minimum, but only if you purchase them locally. And then there are mobile phones, which are usually a much cheaper option than calling from your hotel. The country code for Spain is 34. To phone home from Spain, 00 gets you an international line; country codes are 1 for the United States and Canada, 61 for Australia, 64 for New Zealand, and 44 for the United Kingdom.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

Players began to live alternate lives through their game avatars, even though they could only see the digital world they inhabited through the two-dimensional window of their computer monitor. For a lot of people, even this early crude form of virtual reality already seemed more compelling than the real world. In several of the call centers and IT companies where I worked during this time, I recall seeing dozens of my coworkers bring a laptop with them to the office every day, so that they could play World of Warcraft from their cubicles while taking nonstop tech support calls. Even more astounding was when I learned that MMORPG players had started to sell swords, armor, and other virtual magic items on eBay for real money.


pages: 680 words: 157,865

Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design by Diomidis Spinellis, Georgios Gousios

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, continuous integration, corporate governance, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, higher-order functions, iterative process, linked data, locality of reference, loose coupling, meta-analysis, MVC pattern, Neal Stephenson, no silver bullet, peer-to-peer, premature optimization, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, semantic web, smart cities, social graph, social web, SPARQL, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, traveling salesman, Turing complete, type inference, web application, zero-coupon bond

Negotiating content in a resource-oriented environment In addition to picking the physical representation within the context of resolving a request, we might also enable the server to decide how much of the referenced data set to return based on the identity of the user, the application being used, etc. We can imagine a scenario where a call center agent using a relevant application needs to access sensitive information to resolve an issue. This could include Social Security numbers, credit card numbers (or hopefully only the last four digits), home addresses, etc. There is a specific business need to justify the agent accessing this information, so we could have a declarative policy in place that lets it happen.


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

With two babies, the money was a godsend, but reinstatement in her former position was now out of the question. “Still, we’re lucky. We have two bedrooms. We know people with children sleeping on the sofa. Or they’ve stopped eating meat. All these qualified people, barely making it to the end of the month. One of my friends has a doctorate in biology, but all she can find is work in a call center, for €1,000 a month. We’re like medieval serfs. We’re Italy’s new poor.” In France, she says, they make it easier for parents, with state funding for day care and kindergarten. “In all of Rome, there are maybe three or four day-care centers. You’re really thinking of having kids?” she asks Sabrina.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Now, enough claptrap has certainly been written about “the Internet” and its ability to build bridges and establish connections across nations. In that sense, Zuckerman is right: there is too much “imaginary cosmopolitanism” floating around. But Zuckerman himself is operating under a bunch of myths when he thinks that the reason people from Idaho have not yet talked to people from India—except when on hold with a call center in Bangalore—is that technology somehow has stood in the way. Whereas other technology pundits harbor illusions about the cosmopolitan nature of “the Internet,” Zuckerman harbors illusions about the cosmopolitan nature—both its feasibility and desirability—of human beings as such. His is actually a more damaging kind of imaginary cosmopolitanism, for it assumes that “the Internet” is not turning all of us into xenophiles fast enough.


pages: 769 words: 169,096

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

This outside competition may affect the demand for European clerical workers; consequently, the demand for and location of office buildings in European cities might change. This change in technology as well as the availability and salary levels of Indian workers contribute exogenous forces that may affect European cities’ land use. These globally generated exogenous factors likewise impact land use in Indian cities. For example, the recent mushrooming of call centers in Indian cities, a type of land use unknown only a few years ago, is a direct consequence of the availability of new technology and of the higher salaries of European and American clerical workers compared to their Indian counterparts. Markets react quickly to worldwide changes. Falling demand for some activities translates into lower rents for the buildings where these activities are taking place, triggering demand for rapid land use change.


Lonely Planet Colombia (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Tom Masters, Kevin Raub

airport security, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Downton Abbey, El Camino Real, Francisco Pizarro, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, land reform, low cost airline, off-the-grid, race to the bottom, sustainable-tourism, urban sprawl

Expect to pay between COP$100 and COP$400 per minute for a call, depending on the network and provider. To purchase a phone or SIM you'll need to show identification and proof of address (your hotel is fine). This is supposedly for security but in fact it's to prevent the street vendors from purchasing phones in bulk and competing with the cell-phone provider's own call centers. There have been cases of identity theft (they will photocopy your documents) so only purchase a cell phone from a provider's official retail outlet. Phone Codes It is possible to call direct to just about anywhere in Colombia, but to call a cell phone from a landline, you will need to dial a prefix of 03 before the number (some landlines are blocked from calling cell phones); conversely, to dial a landline from a cell phone, you'll need to prefix the number with 03 + city code.


pages: 624 words: 189,582

The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda by Ali H. Soufan, Daniel Freedman

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, call centre, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, independent contractor, PalmPilot, power law, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

No one was home, and he let himself in using the spare key. He hid the video camera and called Badawi in Sanaa. Quso reported to Badawi that the operation had taken place but that he hadn’t videotaped it. Next Quso headed to al-Ridda Mosque for the noon prayer. On the way, he received a page from Badawi and stopped at a calling center near a taxi stand to get in touch with him. Badawi asked him to “report the news.” Quso told him that he heard ambulances heading toward the harbor but didn’t know anything else. Badawi asked Quso to go to his (Badawi’s) house to collect three bags and drop them off at his in-laws’. He told Badawi that he was nervous about the situation in Aden and was planning to head to Sanaa.


pages: 695 words: 189,074

Fodor's Essential Israel by Fodor's Travel Guides

bike sharing, call centre, coronavirus, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mount Scopus, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, sensible shoes, starchitect, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Tel Aviv has 120 km (75 miles) of designated bike lanes and a bike rental system. Look for the green Tel-O-Fun pay stations throughout the city. Use a credit card to pay the daily fee of NIS 17 (NIS 23 on Saturday and holidays) or weekly fee of NIS 70. If you need help, dial *6070 to talk to the call center. In Jerusalem, there are a number of bicycle paths to ride, including the landscaped 5-km (3-mile) pedestrian and bike path that goes along the old train tracks, starting at the First Station, where you can rent bicycles. A new circular bike trail opened in Jerusalem’s Metropolitan Park, and there are plans to expand it in coming years.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

A great many American jobs were of course lost—in some cases, like textiles, entire sectors were wiped out—but to the extent that this was part of American capital’s capacity to move on to new manufacturing sectors, it reflected not a hollowing-out of manufacturing but a restructuring.63 And there was often outsourcing within the US (for example, auto suppliers going to the southern states or call centers established in prisons), as well as outsourcing abroad. Most US job losses stemmed not from foreign outsourcing but from the impact of the sustained increases in manufacturing productivity at home, which in the boom of the 1990s was compensated for by job creation (usually at lower wages) in other sectors.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

There is added demand on our hippocampal place memory system as we try to absorb a new physical environment. In addition, losing things in the information age can pose certain paradoxes or catch-22s. If you lose your credit card, what number do you call to report it? It’s not that easy because the number was written on the back of the card. And most credit card call centers ask you to key in your card number, something that you can’t do if you don’t have the card right in front of you (unless you’ve memorized that sixteen-digit number plus the three-digit secret card verification code on the back). If you lose your wallet or purse, it can be difficult to obtain any cash because you no longer have ID.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

After a desultory academic career that consisted of dropping into and out of colleges in Washington, DC, von Meister joined Western Union. He made money with a bunch of side ventures, including salvaging some of the company’s discarded equipment, and then launched a service that allowed people to dictate important letters to call centers for overnight delivery. It was successful, but in what became a pattern, von Meister was forced out for spending wildly and not paying any attention to operations.38 Von Meister was one of the original breed of media entrepreneurs—think Ted Turner rather than Mark Zuckerberg—who lived larger than life and mixed craziness with shrewdness so thoroughly that they became almost indistinguishable.


PostGIS in Action by Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu

business logic, call centre, crowdsourcing, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, functional programming, Google Earth, job automation, McMansion, Mercator projection, Network effects, null island, openstreetmap, planetary scale, profit maximization, Ruby on Rails, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, SQL injection, traveling salesman, web application

We won’t hold back on using SQL because the awesome power of PostGIS becomes visible only when you make liberal use of SQL’s bulk-processing capabilities. This example uses the CTE feature again. Listing 11.13. Hexagonal and rectangular grids This example generates both a hexagonal and a rectangular grid, each with 10,201 records. You use CTEs to break up the steps to prevent repetition of code. First you define a CTE called center_point that returns a single-row table with the starting position of the paintbrush . Then you create the paintbrush CTE : the_hex to paint hexagons and the_rect to paint rectangles. For the rectangular grid, you use ST_MakeBox2D because it’s easier and faster to express rectangles as boxes. But because boxes aren’t geometries, you must cast to geometry when needed.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I posted the following on Facebook while writing this chapter: “I might need to do a second volume of my next book, 100% dedicated to the knowledge bombs of Derek Sivers. So much good stuff. Hard to cut.” The most upvoted comment was from Kevin O., who said, “Put a link to the podcast and have them listen. It’s less than two hours, and it will change their life. Tim, you and Derek got me from call center worker to location-independent freelancer with more negotiation power for income and benefits [than] I previously imagined. You both also taught me the value of ‘enough’ and contentment and appreciation, as well as achievement.” That made my week, and I hope this makes yours: fourhourworkweek.com/derek “If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”


pages: 356 words: 186,629

Frommer's Los Angeles 2010 by Matthew Richard Poole

call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, Saturday Night Live, sustainable-tourism, upwardly mobile

A .’S TO P AT T R AC T I O N S 7 Griffith Observatory Made world-famous in the film Rebel Without a Cause, Griffith Observatory’s bronze domes have been Hollywood Hills landmarks since 1935. Closed for r enovation for what seemed like for ever, it finally r eopened in November of 2006 after a $93-million o verhaul. The central dome houses the 300-seat Samuel Oschin Planetarium, where hourly screenings of a narrated 30-minute projection show called “Centered in the U niverse” reveal the stars and planets that ar e hidden fr om the naked eye by the city’s ubiquitous lights and smog. The obser vatory also featur es 60 space-r elated exhibits designed to “ sparkle y our imagination,” the highlight being the largest astr onomically accurate image ev er pr oduced—a 20×152-foot porcelain enamel dazzler that’s cleverly called “The Big Picture.”


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

related services would become very substantial. Building public-sector demand for these services would be one place to start. Moreover, because free software development is a global phenomenon, free software developers who learn their skills within the developing world would be able to export those skills elsewhere. Just as India's call centers leverage the country's colonial past with its resulting broad availability of English speakers, so too countries like Brazil can leverage their active free software development community to provide software services for free software platforms anywhere in the developed and developing worlds. With free software, the developing-world providers can compete as equals.


pages: 620 words: 214,639

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, book value, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, Irwin Jacobs, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Northern Rock, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, too big to fail, traveling salesman, uptick rule, vertical integration, Y2K, yield curve

JPMorgan, for a firm that's supposed to be legendary in their ability to do mergers, this one has been a shit show from the beginning. The classic is they keep talking about how they've hired 40 percent of Bear Stearns's employees or plan to. That's clever, because that includes a couple of thousand people we have that are clerical workers in a call center in Dallas. It includes a whole bunch of people who were hired transitionally for the next few months. Real, live people is a couple thousand, so there's probably ten thousand that won't get hired or won't get hired past three to six months, and the process is just so fucked up.” Friedman paused for a moment and stared out the window onto 47th Street.


Fodor's Costa Rica 2012 by Fodor's

Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, David Attenborough, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, place-making, restrictive zoning, satellite internet, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Phones The good news is that you can now make a direct-dial telephone call from virtually any point on earth. The bad news? You can’t always do so cheaply. Calling from a hotel is almost always the most expensive option; hotels usually add huge surcharges to all calls, particularly international ones. In some countries you can phone from call centers or even the post office. Calling cards usually keep costs to a minimum, but only if you purchase them locally. And then there are mobile phones , which are sometimes more prevalent—particularly in the developing world—than landlines; as expensive as mobile phone calls can be, they are still usually a much cheaper option than calling from your hotel.


The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise by Martin L. Abbott, Michael T. Fisher

always be closing, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, business climate, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, database schema, discounted cash flows, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, friendly fire, functional programming, hiring and firing, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, machine readable, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, the scientific method, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, web application, Y2K

Customer Complaints The next approach to determining availability involves using the customers as a barometer or yardstick for your site’s performance. This measurement might be in the form of the number of inbound calls or emails to your customer support center or the number of posts on your forums. Often, companies with very sophisticated customer support services will have real-time tracking metrics on support calls and emails. Call centers measure this every day and have measurements on how many they receive as well as how many they can service. If there is a noticeable spike in such service requests, it is often the fault of an issue with the application. How could we turn the number of calls into an availability measurement? There are many ways to create a formula for doing this, but they are all inaccurate.


PostGIS in Action, 2nd Edition by Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu

business logic, call centre, crowdsourcing, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, functional programming, Google Earth, job automation, McMansion, megacity, Mercator projection, Network effects, null island, openstreetmap, planetary scale, profit maximization, Ruby on Rails, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, SQL injection, traveling salesman, web application

Listing 11.13 Hexagonal and rectangular grids WITH center_point(x,y) AS (SELECT -288499, -2718), paintbrush(the_hex,the_rect) AS ( SELECT ST_SetSRID( ST_Translate( B CTE of center_points C Licensed to tracy moore <nordick.an@gmail.com> www.it-ebooks.info CTE of hexagonal and rectangular dual paintbrushes 280 Final CTE D CHAPTER 11 Geometry and geography processing ST_GeomFromText( 'POLYGON(( 0 0,64 64,64 128,0 192, -64 128,-64 64,0 0 ))' ), x, y ), 2163 ) AS the_hex, ST_SetSRID(ST_Translate(CAST(ST_MakeBox2D(ST_Point(-64,0), ST_Point(64,192)) AS geometry), x, y), 2163) AS the_rect FROM center_point ) SELECT xf.x, yf.y, ST_Translate(paintbrush.the_hex, xf.x_hex, yf.y_hex) AS hex_tile, ST_Translate(paintbrush.the_rect, xf.x_rect,yf.y_rect) AS rect_tile FROM ( SELECT x, x*(ST_XMax(the_hex) - ST_XMin(the_hex)) AS x_hex, x*(ST_XMax(the_rect) - ST_XMin(the_rect)) AS x_rect FROM generate_series(-50, 50) AS x CROSS JOIN paintbrush ) AS xf CROSS JOIN ( SELECT y, y*(ST_YMax(the_hex) - ST_YMin(the_hex)) AS y_hex, y*(ST_YMax(the_rect) - ST_YMin(the_rect)) AS y_rect FROM generate_series(-50, 50) AS y CROSS JOIN paintbrush ) AS yf CROSS JOIN paintbrush; This example generates both a hexagonal and a rectangular grid, each with 10,201 records. You use CTEs to break up the steps to prevent repetition of code. First you define a CTE called center_point that returns a single-row table with the starting position of the paintbrush B. Then you create the paintbrush CTE C: the_hex to paint hexagons and the_rect to paint rectangles. For the rectangular grid, you use ST_MakeBox2D because it’s easier and faster to express rectangles as boxes. But because boxes aren’t geometries, you must cast to geometry when needed.


pages: 944 words: 243,883

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

Contractors, not corporate employees, serviced ExxonMobil station managers under fixed-price agreements: They mowed lawns, painted walls, and they also installed and repaired electronic and gasoline storage systems. When a leak alarm sounded at any Exxon station in the mid-Atlantic region, it automatically alerted a call center in Greensboro, North Carolina, operated by an ExxonMobil contractor called Gilbarco Veeder-Root. The contractor’s technicians in turn telephoned another independent company in Connecticut called I.P.T., which was responsible for dispatching maintenance specialists to Exxon stations. That January morning, in response to the ringing alarm, I.P.T. telephoned Alger Electric, which had a subcontract in the Baltimore area.


pages: 920 words: 237,085

Rick Steves Florence & Tuscany 2017 by Rick Steves

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon footprint, Dava Sobel, Google Hangouts, index card, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wikimedia commons, young professional

But when it’s not too busy, they generally let people come and go at will and stay as long as they like. If you want to find out beforehand if there’s a long line, you can call the ticket desk (tel. 055-284-361). Firenze Card users don’t need a reservation and can walk in whenever they like. To reserve in advance, call the chapel a day ahead (tel. 055-276-8224, English spoken, call center open Mon-Sat 9:30-13:00 & 14:00-17:00, Sun 9:30-12:30). If you get a busy signal, keep trying; it’s best to call in the afternoon. You can also try via email—info@muse.comune.fi.it. Dress Code: Modest dress (covered shoulders and knees—a scarf will do) is requested when visiting the church and chapel (if it’s very hot, they might be lenient—but better not to chance it).


pages: 900 words: 241,741

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Petre

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, California gold rush, call centre, clean tech, clean water, Donald Trump, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, Y2K

We desperately tried to accelerate infrastructure bond spending to build highways and rail lines, build new roads, and repair old bridges. We found money for job programs to retrain construction workers losing their jobs. We persuaded big lenders to freeze interest rates for more than one hundred thousand home owners most at risk. We hired more than one thousand people to staff state call centers to advise mortgage holders in trouble and help people with unemployment benefits. Just before Christmas, US treasury secretary Hank Paulson visited to discuss the subprime mortgage crisis. He and I held a “town hall” meeting in Stockton, and I listened to him talk about “minimizing the spillage” of the housing downturn into the overall economy.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

While the Cloud may see urban nodes and fabrics as like any other material for computational expression, its main switches are themselves gathered into tight rings of intensive transcontinental hubs, centralizing bandwidth economies into a specific few cellular cities. Away from those bandwidth capitals, smaller Cloud data centers, assembly factories, fulfillment centers, call centers, and shipping ports dot more remote geographies and gather itinerant laborers into their midst (or, alternatively, protect themselves against all human contact). In special cases, Cloud platforms design their own architectural footprints by gathering their higher-level cognitive-managerial functions into megastructural corporate headquarters, often city-scale buildings with backs turned on their immediate location (more on these below).


Fodor's Costa Rica 2013 by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

airport security, Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, David Attenborough, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, place-making, restrictive zoning, satellite internet, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, urban sprawl

PHONES The good news is that you can now make a direct-dial telephone call from virtually any point on earth. The bad news? You can’t always do so cheaply. Calling from a hotel is almost always the most expensive option; hotels usually add huge surcharges to all calls, particularly international ones. In some countries you can phone from call centers or even the post office. Calling cards usually keep costs to a minimum, but only if you purchase them locally. And then there are mobile phones, which are sometimes more prevalent—particularly in the developing world—than landlines; as expensive as mobile phone calls can be, they are still usually a much cheaper option than calling from your hotel.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Olivetti’s workers were nearly all gone, and the company’s tennis courts lay abandoned. Massimo Benedetto, who had worked at Olivetti’s Ivrea facility for thirty years, recalled, “Gradually at first and then suddenly, everything fell apart.” In 2014, Ivrea’s main employers were a state-​run health service and the ecb hesitates, the italian fault line deepens 345 two call centers, which together employed just 3,100 people. The town had little work for its thirty year ​olds, and many of them lived on their parents’ pensions. Italy’s home-​ appliance producers, renowned until as recently as the 1990s, had been unable to withstand the mounting low-​wage competition from Asia and Eastern Europe.


Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Tours last about 2½ hours; meeting points vary. ALCATRAZ Almost 150 years before Guantanamo, a rocky island in the middle of San Francisco Bay became the nation’s first military prison: Alcatraz ( 415-981-7625; www.alcatrazcruises.com, www.nps.gov/alcatraz; adult/child day $26/16, night $33/19.50; call center 8am-7pm, ferries depart Pier 33 every 30min 9am-3:55pm, plus 6:10pm & 6:45pm). Civil War deserters were kept in wooden pens along with Native American ‘unfriendlies,’ including 19 Hopis who refused to send their children to government boarding schools where Hopi religion and language were banned.


Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Keep all medical receipts and documentation for billing and insurance claims and reimbursement later. Some health-insurance policies require you to get pre-authorization over the phone for medical treatment before seeking help. Overseas visitors with travel-health-insurance policies may need to contact a call center for an assessment by phone before getting medical treatment. Insurance Travel Insurance Getting travel insurance to cover theft, loss and medical problems is highly recommended. Some policies do not cover ‘risky’ activities such as scuba diving, motorcycling and skiing so read the fine print.


pages: 926 words: 312,419

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel

activist lawyer, business cycle, call centre, card file, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, job satisfaction, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero day

Three decades later, we are caught up in what a recent book dubbed “The New Ruthless Economy.” High tech and new management styles put workers on what the author Simon Head calls “digital assembly lines” with little room for creativity or independent thought. As much as 4 percent of the work force is now employed in call centers, reading canned scripts and being supervised with methods known as “management by stress.” Doctors defer to managed-care administrators and practice speed medicine: in 1997, they spent an average of eight minutes talking to a patient, less than half the time they spent a decade earlier. It is much the same in other fields.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

ASan Francisco City Clinic Contact this organization about sexually transmitted diseases, emergency contraception or post-exposure prevention of HIV. ASome health-insurance policies require you to get pre-authorization for non-emergency medical treatment before seeking help. AOverseas visitors with travel health-insurance policies may need to contact a call center for an assessment by phone before getting medical treatment. AThe tap water is safe to drink. Hypothermia ASkiers and hikers will find that temperatures in the mountains and desert can quickly drop below freezing, especially during winter. Even a sudden spring shower or high winds can lower your body temperature dangerously fast.


pages: 1,280 words: 384,105

The Best of Best New SF by Gardner R. Dozois

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Columbine, congestion charging, dark matter, Doomsday Book, double helix, Extropian, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, three-masted sailing ship, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, zero-sum game

This is when the working class finds its voice again. And it’s going to say: no more. You see.” p. Stockbrokers. q. Weapons designers and manufacturers. r. Arts Council executives. s. Pension fund managers. t. Cast and production staff of all TV soaps. u. All sex crime offenders. v. All violent crime offenders. w. Call center owners and managers. COLIN As ever, the M1 1 was horrendous, a solid queue of bad-tempered traffic. Nearly two hours from the M25 to the Stanstead junction. Not strictly as ever because I was smiling most of the way. It just didn’t bother me anymore. I just kept thinking this was the last time I would ever have to drive down one of this country’s abysmal, potholed, clogged, nineteen-sixties anachronisms.


Melody Beattie 4 Title Bundle: Codependent No More and 3 Other Best Sellers by Melody Beattie: A Collection of Four Melody Beattie Best Sellers by Melody Beattie

Albert Einstein, call centre, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, fear of failure, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson

An important idea to remember about feelings is that they are just emotional energy and we’re allowed to feel however we feel. There’s no right and wrong about emotions; the names are just words we use to identify that particular emotional energy burst. There’s another way we can feel, another space we’re each entitled to. That space is called “centered, balanced, and clear.” When we identify, feel, and release whatever feeling is up each day, we’ll easily and naturally return to that quiet, peaceful, centered place. Sometimes, if the emotional burst is big—of the volcanic size—it might take a few days or a week to return to that clear, centered place.


California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

MEDICAL SERVICES Bear Mountain Family Medicine/Urgent Care ( 909-878-3696; 41949 Big Bear Blvd) POST Post office (cnr Big Bear Lake & Pine Knot Dr) TOURIST INFORMATION Big Bear Discovery Center ( 909-382-2790; www.bigbeardiscoverycenter.com; North Shore Dr, Fawnskin; 8am-6pm May-Oct, to 4:30pm Nov-Apr) Operated in cooperation with the US Forest Service, the center offers outdoor information, exhibits and guided tours. Big Bear Lake Resort Association ( 909-866-7000, 800-424-4232; www.bigbear.com; 630 Bartlett Rd; 8am-5pm daily, call center to 6pm Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm Sat & Sun) Maps, information and room reservations. Activities HIKING In summer, people trade their ski boots for hiking boots and hit the forest trails. If you only have time for one short hike, make it the Castle Rock Trail, which is 2.4-mile round-trip and offers superb views.


Frommer's California 2009 by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, European colonialism, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, post-work, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

A .’S TO P AT T R AC T I O N S Griffith Observatory Made world-famous in the film Rebel Without a Cause, Griffith Observatory’s bronze domes have been Hollywood Hills landmarks since 1935. Closed for r enovation for what seemed like for ever, it finally r eopened in November of ’06 after a $93-million r enovation. The central dome houses the 300-seat Samuel Oschin Planetarium, where hourly scr eenings of a narrated half-hour pr ojection show called “Centered in the U niverse” reveal the stars and planets that ar e hidden fr om the naked eye by the city’s ubiquitous lights and smog. The O bservatory also featur es 60 space-r elated exhibits designed to “ sparkle y our imagination,” the highlight being the largest astr onomically accurate image ev er pr oduced—a 20×152-foot porcelain enamel dazzler that’s cleverly called “The Big Picture.”


pages: 1,800 words: 596,972

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

In 1997, for example, the Ellis Island Museum removed photographs and graphic eyewitness texts of the Armenian genocide from an exhibition. It had done the same thing in 1991. In 2001, the Turkish consul-general in San Francisco objected to the use of a former First World War memorial cross as an Armenian memorial to the genocide. When I investigated this complaint in San Francisco, it turned out that a so-called “Center for Scholars in Historical Accuracy; Stanford Chapter”—which, it turned out, had nothing to do with Stanford University—had claimed in an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle that such a memorial would become “a political advertisement to preach their [Armenian] version of history which is roundly disputed among objective scholars and historians.”


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Cars pay a $6 toll to cross from Marin to San Francisco; pedestrians and cyclists stroll the east sidewalk for free. ALCATRAZ For 150 years, the name has given the innocent chills and the guilty cold sweats. Alcatraz ( Alcatraz Cruises 415-981-7625; www.alcatrazcruises.com, www.nps.gov/alcatraz; adult/child day $26/16, night $33/19.50; call center 8am-7pm) has been the nation’s first military prison, a maximum-security penitentiary housing A-list criminals like Al Capone, and hotly disputed Native American territory. No prisoners escaped Alcatraz alive, but since importing guards and supplies cost more than putting up prisoners at the Ritz, the prison was closed in 1963.


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, asset allocation, bike sharing, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, distributed generation, distributed ledger, diversification, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, zero-coupon bond

The fee for a PTIN for 2022 is $35.95 (same as for 2021), of which $21 is the IRS user fee to cover the costs of administering the PTIN program (the $21 per application or renewal is fixed in the regulations), and $14.95 is payable to a third-party contractor for processing PTIN applications and operating a call center. The fee is non-refundable. The 2020 regulations followed years of litigation over the authority of the IRS to charge a user fee for obtaining or renewing a PTIN. A federal district court held in 2017 that the IRS lacked the statutory to charge a PTIN user fee and enjoined the IRS from imposing one (Steele, 260 F.