#if anyone has good resources for new england in this regard please let me know!!!!!!

[bones-n-bookles]

I need to make a fire kit here. I don't know any of the good plants for a nice bow or fire board or stick, or good kindling or cordage. I'm gonna fix that and make a fire kit. Idk how I'll get the info on those plants yet. May just trial and error my way through it. May get lucky and find a book or website or something. The knowledge on this stuff that I have in California was largely passed on to me directly by my mentors so idk how to go about like. Intentionally finding that information for an area I don't know well. But I'm going to find it and find out. I'm going to make my own cordage as well I think, though I may be lazy and use something else for the fire kit. I'd like to make a couple fire kits though, so we'll see. No clue how the fall/winter season will affect this, it never played a huge part in California.

Also I may collect some acorns and make some acorn pancakes or cookies???? There's hella acorns dropping rn. It's a good season to learn my oaks and make something from acorns.

[doshmanziari]

Architectural Criticism in 2021/2022 || Part 1.5

Before writing a fuller continuation of my previous essay on architectural criticism, I’m inserting a mini-essay that focuses on a particular piece of criticism. Let me be clear: I don’t see Kate Wagner, the person behind @mcmansionhell, as an enemy; I’m just using one of her articles as an example because I had, in my essay, already linked two articles of hers (more accurately, one article and an image from another), and I’d rather elaborate on what I mean when I write “...a vapid buildup to a politically convenient takeaway” than bring in an entirely different item. Wagner, in my view, represents a sort of destabilizing criticism that takes pleasure in tackling “dry” subject matter with breathless, Meme-heavy sarcasm. I find the tone off-putting, but I appreciate it as one attempt to invigorate and broaden the audiences of architectural appraisal. My issue is that by now the joke has overestimated its capacity for judgmental clarity. Really anything can be made fun of if you’re determined enough, and the more of an unquestioning audience you have the easier it is to believe everything you say is true or coherent.

The image was from this 2018 Vox article: “Betsy DeVos’ summer home deserves a special place in McMansion Hell” (a title likely devised by the editor; given the other residences Wagner has lambasted, I would be surprised if she truly believes this is among the worst). My observations won’t make sense unless anyone who is reading this reads her article as well, so please do that if you’d like to follow along. It should take only a couple of minutes.

What I’d first draw readers’ attention to is that Wagner spends the first four paragraphs on the United States’ beyond-vast inequality of wealth. Two of these paragraphs are the article’s largest, and the article is twelve-paragraphs-long, meaning that 1/3 of it is devoted to establishing a socio-economic context -- at least, that is the pretense. Once Wagner writes “...getting paid to make fun of DeVos’s tacky seaside decor is one of few ways to both feed myself and make myself feel better”, it is clear that her personal intent is a kind of vengeful mocking, and that her intent for readers is to prime them to associatively, knee-jerkingly despise anything which could come next with flat-affect “lmao”s. It’s hardly irrelevant to mention economic realities when examining luxury items (and what else is a mansion?), but Wagner’s subsequent analysis is not really architectural or even artistic: it is rather about looking at several photographs of a building, knowing who lives there and hating that person (and also imagining that they were responsible for all design decisions), and then mocking this-and-that in whatever ways one can devise. These grievances are understandable, but understandable grievances do not automatically lead to perceptive criticism.

Please look (perhaps again) at the first image. Note that only four, maybe, of the fourteen details Wagner chooses to focus on -- “no wry comment needed”, “these look like playdoh stamps”, “when you love consistency”, and “oh my god is this a shutter” -- approach anything vaguely resembling coherent criticism; and the other four images fare even worse (with the exception of the highlighting of an apparently absurd interior balcony). The rest are inane attempts at saying anything at all. Writing “hell portal” by an upper porch area may be funny for a moment, but what does it actually express? Well, nothing, except the author’s own irritation which will find whatever it can to announce its contemptuous sarcasm. Wagner’s captions will land only to the degree that the reader is humorously sympathetic.

The aforementioned remarks, excepting the one about the embedded chubby Tuscan columns’ Play-Doh-likeness, suggest that the worst thing a building can do is be formally heterogeneous. The implicative corollary here is that good architecture is eminently justifiable in all of its parts -- consistent, unified, rational. This is as fine a personal belief as anything else, but when it is wielded as dogma against architecture which has no interest in being a Petit Trianon it can only reveal its intellectual self-limitations. Wagner writes that “there is a difference between architectural complexity and a mess”, yet what that difference may be is hand-waved away. We just have to believe that thirteen different windows styles is too much. What’s the threshold? Does it depend on the size of the building? The types of styles used? Who knows.

Now of course bad architecture exists, and sometimes the failure indeed points to deficient editorial acumen; for architecture, like any other art, is as much about what’s included as what’s excluded. But in saying so little about the shingle style itself, Wagner seems to have given no thought to readers concluding that all shingle style houses are freakish -- more specifically, concluding that this freakishness is a damning transgression, and that no self-respecting, punching-up class-warrior would ever be caught dead sincerely enjoying their geometric, “exquisite corpse” escapades. In fact, the freakish tendencies of shingle style houses are just what make them such great fun to see, visit, or reside in. Wagner’s article, as far as I can tell, omits this possibility. When she writes, “Betsy likely went with this style because it is very popular in New England and in coastal enclaves of the rich and famous in general”, one is being pushed to presume that the only probable reason the shingle style exists or could be preferred over another style is to signal élite solidarity.

The photograph right above is of Kragsyde, a Massachusetts shingle style mansion, designed by the US-Northeast-oriented firm of Peabody & Stearns, completed in the 1880s. It was demolished almost a century ago, but the few exterior images of it which remain are, I think, fascinating -- maybe most of all for its enormous archway, possibly a porte-cochère, which has a thin, overextending keystone bizarrely driven into the top like a nail puncturing a petrified rainbow. I bring the building up because Wagner gives us no reason to consider why Kragsyde may have been a genuine architectonic accomplishment and not merely an oversized farce of contiguous pretensions. To the layperson hot off of the Vox piece, there may be no artistic difference between it and DeVos’ place, except that perhaps Kragsyde has a more consistent fenestrative application (would that make it better? if so, why?).

I appreciate that only so much can be said when you’re limited to less than a thousand words, especially when the issue is “complicated” (as the byline for Vox’s First-person series advertises). But the problem I keep coming back to is how DeVos’ mansion is treated as a stand-in for DeVos herself. This makes any architectural critique, no matter how pressed it is for size, flimsily presentist: its durability starts and ends with how alive the architecture’s resident(s) and political presence are. On some emotional level, this is pretty sensible: if we despise monarchical institution, we can find a sort of loophole to enjoying Versailles palace on the basis of it no longer being the residence of royalty. Our awe over its decadence and scope is intersectionally “admissible” on the basis of its having become a UNESCO World Heritage site. Similarly, one can imagine DeVos’ mansion being appreciated in a hundred years (should it still exist then) because the passage of time will have rendered DeVos’ person a historical fact, and perhaps more separable, and then tolerable, in that regard -- even if the building remains private.

But if architecture is, as a craft, critically whittled down to nothing more or less than inorganic expressions of social disparities, with every aesthetic decision a reflection of politically explicable taste, then we must assume that a great deal of the world’s most remarkable architecture is equally ridiculous and despicable, since so much of it was born out of great privilege and required specialized resources. I doubt Wagner actually believes this, because it would betray the entire premise of her McMansion Hell project, which is to demonstrate how so many modern day mansions are deeply unpleasant mounds of visual illiteracy, and cannot hold even a stump of a candle to the luminously learned and eclectic talents of prior great architects such as Mackintosh, Norman Shaw, Lutyens, or Ledoux. So what’s the takeaway here? As far as I can tell, it’s simply that if you hate Betsy DeVos, and if you care about class, you should hate her house too. And I do not think that that is architectural criticism.

[warninggraphiccontent]

5 June 2020

A quiet week

Yeah, right.

It was Data Bites #11 on Wednesday. It was good. You can watch the video here. It will also appear here soon. There's a Twitter thread here. Previous events are here. The next one will be on 1 July. And Glyn made paella.

I wrote 3,000 words explaining how government is planning to use our personal data to combat coronavirus - contact tracing apps and much else besides...

...and I discussed data on this week's IfG podcast with team IfG, and special guest Rowland.

I wittered on a bit more on Twitter about the tenth anniversary of David Cameron's open data letter.

What are you doing this Monday morning at 0930? You're watching me interview digital government rockstar and revolutionary, Audrey Tang, about Taiwan's coronavirus response, aren't you? Register here.

We're doing a short report on digital government and coronavirus - how did existing services cope, how has it accelerated change, etc. If you're a UK civil servant, we'd be very grateful if you could spend two minutes filling out our survey on remote working tools. Thank you!

Don't forget our spreadsheet of data-related developments in the UK government's coronavirus response. And don't forget to add anything that we've forgotten to add.

There's just under a week left to enter the Orwell Youth Prize. If you know any 12-18 year olds, let them know!

Some good people doing good things:

Julian (and other former colleagues) have just launched Engage Britain, a new approach to tackling the biggest challenges facing the UK (using, in part, the same platform Taiwan uses for public engagement)

Rachel has helped bring together a number of charities to call for a data collective to get charities the data they need to make a difference; and

Hera is leaving the Open Contracting Partnership to go full-time at Chayn, a global volunteer network providing resources to help women experiencing abuse.

Giuseppe highlighted Loud Numbers, a new data sonification podcast coming later this year. Here are my data sonifications from late last year.

And to bring it full circle back to this week's Data Bites... I couldn't resist illustrating just how stupid this week's developments in parliament have been by comparing how long the voting queue of MPs was to London buses and Big Ben.*

Finally, the excellent Ben Worthy has a plea to anyone who's used parliamentary data:

Who’s Watching Parliament: help with our survey of data users

Our new project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, looks at how new data is being used to monitor parliament. We want to know more about who is using data, what they are using it for and how this could impact on their thinking about Parliament and democracy in the UK.

If you have used Parliament data, please help us by filling in our short survey.

The project is being overseen by Dr. Ben Worthy, an academic at Birkbeck College. Please ask him any questions via email.

Have a great weekend

Gavin

*Yes, I know, Big Ben is the name of the doctor.

Today's links:

Tips, tech, etc

How to hold an unconference online (James Cattell)

How Hansard is reporting parliamentary business during lockdown (Parliamentary Digital Service)

Join the COVID-19 Response Network: A Slack Workspace for Public Servants (Apolitical)

Power Dynamics and Inclusion in Virtual Meetings (Aspiration)

Working from home (Andrea Cooper)

Graphic content

#BlackLivesMatter

Minneapolis Police Use Force Against Black People at 7 Times the Rate of Whites* (New York Times)

Covid-19 pandemic hits black voters’ incomes hardest, FT poll shows* (FT)

Photos From The George Floyd Protests, City By City* (New York Times)

1,023 people have been shot and killed by police in the past year* (Washington Post)

W.E.B. Du Bois’ Visionary Infographics Come Together for the First Time in Full Color (Smithsonian Magazine)

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 (Nightingale)

What W. E. B. Du Bois Conveyed in His Captivating Infographics* (The New Yorker)

Viral content: cases

UK excess deaths during pandemic reach 62,000* (FT)

UK coronavirus death toll passes 50,000, official figures show (The Guardian)

Coronavirus excess deaths: UK has one of highest levels in Europe (The Guardian)

Coronavirus in charts: the fact-checkers correcting falsehoods (Nature)

Democracies contain epidemics most effectively* (The Economist)

A deep dive into testing statistics (Ed Conway)

Disparities in the risk and outcomes of COVID-19 (Public Health England)

Exclusive: Government censored BAME covid-risk review (HSJ)

This is how many tests have been done, and those that were sent out in May (Paul Bradshaw/Flourish)

There Has Been an Increase in Other Causes of Deaths, Not Just Coronavirus* (New York Times)

Where U.S. coronavirus cases are on the rise (Reuters)

British nursing homes in crisis as deaths mount (Reuters)

Revealed: the coronavirus death toll across Britain - how many excess deaths has your area had?* (Telegraph)

Viral content: consequences

Coronavirus and unemployment: a five nation comparison (IfG)

The vaccine: the only way back to previous life (El Pais)

Trust and Behavioural Responses to COVID-19 (trustgov)

Trust in UK government and news media COVID-19 information down, concerns over misinformation from government and politicians up (Reuters Institute)

Next Wave of U.S. Job Cuts Targets Millions of Higher-Paid Workers* (Bloomberg)

American retailers have laid off or furloughed one-fifth of their workers* (The Economist)

Only 12% of Brits think MPs should have to physically be in Commons to vote during COVID-19 crisis (YouGov)

Is Britain easing lockdown too soon?* (New Statesman)

Anti-viral content

Environmental justice (IPPR)

The hospital corridor (Dr Kate McLean)

Ministerial directions (IfG)

Ministerial moves (me for IfG)

Air pollution in China back to pre-Covid levels and Europe may follow (The Guardian)

‘Going in the Wrong Direction’: More Tropical Forest Loss in 2019* (New York Times)

Meta data

Viral content: contact details

Personal data and coronavirus (me for IfG)

Spot the difference – explaining the Covid-19 apps (ODI)

Germany and Korea expose flaws in the NHS track and trace plan* (Wired)

The coronavirus pandemic highlights the need for a surveillance debate beyond ‘privacy’ (Inforrm)

UK ‘test and trace’ service did not complete mandatory privacy checks (Politico)

Book excerpt: Developing for privacy in the pandemic (Heather Burns)

Viral content: lies, damn lies and...

Sir David Norgrove response to Matt Hancock regarding the Government’s COVID-19 testing data (UK Statistics Authority - more)

Statistics Watchdog Still Not Satisfied With ‘Trustworthiness’ Of Covid Test Figures (Huffington Post)

Informing the pandemic response: What’s next from the ONS? (ONS)

‘No part of the economy remains untouched’: update on how the ONS is measuring the impact of COVID-19 (ONS)

Interview with Sir Ian Diamond, National Statistician of the United Kingdom (UN)

Viral content: everything else

Why we’re calling for a data collective (Catalyst)

The problem of modelling: Public policy and the coronavirus (TLS)

Excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic (FT)

AI firm that worked with Vote Leave given new coronavirus contract (The Guardian)

Flawed data casts cloud over Spain’s lockdown strategy* (FT - thread)

Vital data and research projects to tackle COVID-19 searchable via new developments in online health data portal (HDR UK)

Covid, hysteresis, and the future of work (VoxEU)

Big tech

Welcome to the United States of Amazon* (Tortoise)

Whole Foods Just Fired an Employee Who Kept Track of Coronavirus Cases (Vice)

Facebook’s Smooth New Political Fixer (Politico)

Facebook Employees Stage Virtual Walkout to Protest Trump Posts* (New York Times)

Anti-viral content: digital government

More must be done to realise the value of geospatial data (Public Technology)

Facing up to the digital identity challenge (HM Land Registry)

Vision, Voice, and Technology: Is There a Global “Open Government” Trend?* (Administration & Society)

Archival Catalogue Record Identifiers (Down the Code Mine)

SHARED, CROSS-GOVERNMENT PLATFORMS (Jerry Fishenden)

Anti-viral content: everything else

When the Robot You Consider Family Tries to Sell You Something (Slate)

Measurement for Learning: A Different Approach to Improvement (Centre for Public Impact)

Fact-checking the president:  A study in post-truth (Martin Gurri)

Us folks at @fullfact have produced a prototype API for how our fact checks related to the coronavirus could be made available as a machine readable view (Andy Dudfield)

Who governs? A new global dataset on members of cabinets (Jacob Nyrup and Stuart Bramwell, via Tim)

The police want your phone data. Here’s what they can get — and what they can’t. (recode)

Why Information Matters (The New Atlantis)

Eye-catching advances in some AI fields are not real (Science)

Opportunities

EVENT: How Taiwan became a coronavirus success story (IfG)

JOB: Head of Geovation (Ordnance Survey)

JOB: Head of Digital Inclusion, Accessibility & Standards (HMRC)

JOB: Technical writer (GDS)

JOBS: Product people (GOV.UK)

JOB: Senior Data Analyst (Lower) (Citizens Advice - more)

JOB: ANALYST, DIGITAL RESEARCH UNIT (Institute for Strategic Dialogue)

JOB: Data Scientist / Mid-Level / Senior Data Scientist (Flowminder)

JOB: Technology Editor (Rest of World)

JOB: Research Fellow, TrustGov Project (University of Southampton)

JOB: Learning and Development Specialist – Data Trainer - maternity cover (ODI)

And finally...

Urban henges… or streets of the rising sun (Victoria Crawford)

Taking Lessons From a Bloody Masterpiece* (New York Times)

When you're building a general course about artificial intelligence, you come across some good memes. (Mindy McAdams)

How Pi was nearly changed to 3.2 (Numberphile)

next slide please (Darren Dutton)