Nostalgia…

Here is another interesting quotation from the stuff I am reading these days:

"William Niskanen (1971) made the simple assumption that bureau chiefs seek to maximize the budgets made available to them by legislatures. Budgets were, after all, both the symbol and measure of bureaucratic success, as well as the source of bureaucratic comfort and ease. Using its monopoly position, a bureau will attain a budget which oversupplies the bureau's output to the point at which consumer surplus is matched by the inefficiency of oversupply."

Reading that brought some memories from a certain 3-year period of my life…

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Full citation of the article:

Miller, Gary J. 1997. “The Impact of Economics on Political Science.” Journal of Economic Literature 35 (3): 1173‑1204

Procrastination as a statement?

I am back to school and thus read a lot of interesting stuff. Right now I am preparing for a presentation in a class called "Inside technology – social construction of technology" and am reading an article about social choice in machine design. Basically it says that mechanization of the production process in metal cutting industry "mirrors the antagonistic social relations of capitalist production".

At some point it states: "Workers practiced pacing for many reasons: to keep some time for themselves, to exercise authority over their own work, to avoid killing 'gravy' piece-rate jobs by overproducing and risking a rate cut, to stretch out available work for fear of layoffs, to exercise their creativity and ingenuity in order to 'make out' on 'stinkers (poorly rated jobs), and, of course, to express hostility to management" (I added the italic). All these are described as "collective cooperation and labor-prescribed norms of behavior".

Now I am asking myself: what about procrastination? We, as students, usually tend to procrastinate, don't we? I find the act of procrastination similar to that of pacing – postponing things without an 'objective' reason. So, when we do that, are we exercising authority over our studies or even more than that (of course) expressing our hostility to the institutions? Anyhow, it seems like procrastination can be viewed as a form of collective cooperation or kind of a norm of behavior. In other words, now, when we procrastinate, we can view it as a proletarian statement! :)

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In case you are interested, the full citation of the article is:
David F. Noble "Social Choice in Machine Design: The Case of Automatically Controlled Machine Tools." In MacKenzie and Wajcman (eds.) The Social Shaping of Technology. First Edition (1985), Open University Press. Second Edition (1999). Philadelphia and Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Beebe Lake

Last Saturday my international TA summer camp fellows, their friends and i went for a walk around one of the local attractions - the Beebe Lake. It was nice and is supposed to be even nicer later in the fall when the trees will change the color. We met some people who were jumping from a bridge to the gorge and of course the one whom i saw jumping spoke perfect Russian :)

Here are my pictures from the walk:

Walk on Beebe lake

Aug 26, 2006 - 27 Photos

Nikos has also uploaded his (despite the name he gave to his album, we didn't actually reach the plantation; just the botanic gardens).

N.B. I don't really know what the name of the lake means, but it has nothing to do with Netanyahu - that i checked :)

Wikipedia in Indian laguages

Here is another example for a reason to back Wikipedia's ideology... Isn't it cool?