A kind of Appendix to Workingmans Death.
400 Chinese workers break down the Kaiserstuhl coke factory in the Ruhr Valley into manageable parts and ship them back to their homeland: disassembly in the West – reassembly in the Far East. Dortmund’s last coke workers find themselves helping the Chinese to dismantle their own workplace.Read the full film synopsis here: Link
"Everything Bad Is Good For You" is the title of Steven Johnson's book about contemporary popular culture. His theory of the "sleeper curve" depicts the high and steady growing cognitive demands of video games, tv-programs, movies, and - surprise surprise: the internet. It is entertaining written but more important: Its a more systematic attempt to understand popular culture than the sensational title suggests.
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You. How Popular Culture is Making us Smarter. Penguin Books 2005
I recently read Mike Davis' Planet of Slums. See this interactive map which shows the worlds urban growth from 1955-2015 (estimated) and also the rest of this bbc news site.
Urban Growth Interactive Map
Recently seen:
Workingman's Death
Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?
Impressive:
The working papers of the Shrinking Cities- project. Studies on Ivanovo (Russia), Manchester & Liverpool, Detroit, Leipzig & Halle (Ger).
The Mass Observation Archive specialises in material about everyday life in Britain. It contains papers generated by the original Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), and newer material collected continuously since 1981. The Archive is in the care of the University of Sussex and is housed in the Library in Special Collections.
Vietnam! Vietnam! from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.
Readings and this Movie at http://spiegelman.tumblr.com/post/29921323
Thanks to BitBonk for sending the link.
Some remarks why Howard Becker's "Tricks of the Trade" is a unique imaginative and resourceful book .
Watch these galleries with barplots, dotcharts, dendrograms...
R graph galleries
especially this:
US-Election Map
Everything counts...
WB.
For those interested in the social history of the United States I strongly recommend the Open Collections Program of the Harvard University Library, especially the collections "Women Working 1800-1830" and "Immigrations to the United States 1789-1930" (full access and very comfortable):
Women Working, 1800 - 1930 focuses on women's role in the United States economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including:
* 7,500 pages of manuscripts
* 3,500 books and pamphlets
* 1,200 photographs
Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930, is a web-based collection of selected historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that documents voluntary immigration to the US from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression.
The Dust Bowl was a series of dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1933 to 1939, caused by severe drought conditions coupled with decades of extensive farming ...[from wikipedia]
Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934. DVD Project Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Film Preservation Board
Prohibition, abortion, unions, atheism, the vote for woman, organized crime, loan sharking, juvenile justice, homelessness, police corruption, immigration – in their first decades movies brought an astonishing range of issues to the screen. [...] Treasures III brings this period to life ...
Watch this site. Its about the City of the Future according to the weird visions of its inventor.
Victory Cities
It's an entire city all under one roof, to be built and operated by private enterprise alone. There will not be just one, but many such cities throughout the entire world. Boasting no crime, no pollution, and no over-crowding, Victory City is a veritable utopia for those who've grown weary of trying to find solutions to today's urban problems.
