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The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article asking if intranets are making professors stupid. The article starts out focusing on e-mail and quickly drills down to identify all the time-wasters that turn expensive faculty members from productive, professional thinkers to unproductive, amateur administrators.
A subtler factor arose as an unexpected side effect of the introduction of "productivity-enhancing" networked personal computers to professional life. As the economist Peter G. Sassone observed in the early 1990s, personal computers made administrative tasks just easy enough to eliminate the need for dedicated support staff — you could now type your own memos using a word processor or file expenses directly through an intranet portal. In the short term, these changes seemed to save money. But as Sassone documents, shifting administrative tasks to high-skilled employees led to a decrease in their productivity, which reduced revenue — creating losses that often surpassed the amount of money saved by cuts to support staff. He describes this effect as a diminishment of "intellectual specialization," and it's a dynamic that's not spared higher education, where professors spend an increasing amount of time dealing with the administrative substrate of their institutions through electronic interfaces.
We can actually quantify the background hum of busyness that Knuth so assiduously avoids. In 2014, the Boise State anthropologist John Ziker released the results of a faculty time-use study, which found that the average professor spent a little over 60 hours a week working, with 30 percent of that time dedicated to email and meetings. Anecdotal reports hint that this allocation has only gotten worse over the past five years.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:44PM (1 child)
We used to use Eudora, it was great (for its day). Anymore, we're on Gmail and MS Office because a) we have device proliferation, multiple desktops, phone, occasional tablets, occasional login from random terminals, so the cloud based interface is at least consistent, and b) when you work for a megacorp, you don't get to opt out of MS Office.
Even if the world used Thunderbird, or whatever, and Thunderbird came up to the highest levels of functionality, multi-terminal availability, etc. most people just don't know how to use that power, and just don't care. Before Eudora came out, I identified e-mail clients as one of the most lacking and most needed applications out there - I even bought a book on SMTP and dabbled at the idea of writing something a lot like Eudora, it wasn't out of reach for a one-man-show back then. The problem is: people don't care. They use Facebook messenger, not because it's great, but because it's the path of least resistance.
Now, what would be nice would be a live-in assistant who gets up at 8am, sorts my spam, brings me the most pressing communications, and doesn't embezzle from me (because they're paid enough that they don't need to.) Oh, and they can also do the laundry and watch the children when we're busy doing other things. But, even Ph.D. Principal engineers with 30 years of specialty industry experience don't draw enough salary to begin to afford such a thing, these days, particularly when basic trades like plumbing, electricians, auto maintenance, roof repair, etc. all charge more per hour than the senior engineer earns in salary; I believe due to the nature of modern trade work which seems to spend as much or more time doing "free quotes" and between paying jobs as actually working the trade.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:50PM
I've been looking for a live-in, naked maid myself for a while now. I guess a boy can dream, huh?