It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.”

http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html

He sees the technology taking the middle ground between cargo ships and jet service — faster than a boat, cheaper than a plane.

“They travel at optimum at about 140 knots,” Rist said. “As they get down to 80, you can save that much more fuel because the more the helium takes over.”

He said that intercontinental delivery times would be comparable to second-day air service, with a transatlantic crossing taking as little as 23 hours.

The jazz purist claimed his doctor had warned it was “psychologically inadvisable” for him to listen to anything that could be mistaken for mere contemporary music.

As a member of the African diaspora that is now successful and stable in the US, I’d like to answer your question about African Americans. Unlike African Americans, I did not face structural and institutionalized racism in my own country, my father was not lynched for loving a white woman, my mother was not beaten for trying to vote, my grandparents were allowed to read and write and own property. Thus, my family had knowledge, skills, wealth, and pride to pass down to each generation. The question is not really why African Americans are the way they are, history answers that. African Americans still struggle to be treated as equals. The real question is why are the poor white trash still poor white trash hundreds of years after the Mayflower and institutionalizing superiority based on the color of your skin. If America gave you every opportunity to succeed based solely on the color of your skin, white people, ask yourself why you are now a failure and scared that “those people” are taking over your country and your government?

An accidentally blank instant photograph makes the connection between the emptiness of contemporary middle age and the nihilism of youth 30 years ago. The stray hair and the scanner artefacts remind of us the imperfections that become more apparent with age, while the emptiness of the frame and the shiny texture lets us reflect on the invisibility of the middle aged in modern society.

The latticed surround adds a twist that hints the artist may not be entirely serious :)