photographed in Brooklyn, New York on March 28, 2011

The elements of management commitment and employee involvement are complementary and form the core of any occupational safety and health program. Management’s commitment provides the motivating force and the resources for organizing and controlling activities within an organization. In an effective program, management regards worker safety and health as a fundamental value of the organization and applies its commitment to safety and health protection with as much vigor as to other organizational goals …

A practical analysis of the work environment involves a variety of worksite examinations to identify existing hazards and conditions and operations in which changes might occur to create new hazards. Lack of awareness of a hazard stemming from failure to examine the worksite is a sign that safety and health policies and/or practices are ineffective. Effective management actively analyzes the work and worksite to anticipate and prevent harmful occurrences …

Workplace hazards often can be eliminated by redesigning the jobsite or job. Where it is not feasible to eliminate such hazards, employers must control them to prevent unsafe and unhealthful exposure. Employers must eliminate or control the hazard in a timely manner once it becomes apparent. Specifically, as part of the program, employers should establish procedures to correct or control present or potential hazards in a timely manner.

Excerpted from ‘Construction Industry Digest,’ publication 2202, of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an agency of the United States Department of Labor.

photographed in Brooklyn, New York on March 28, 2011

Respirators protect the user in two basic ways. The first is by the removal of contaminants from the air. Respirators of this type include particulate respirators, which filter out airborne particles; and “gas masks” which filter out chemicals and gases. Other respirators protect by supplying clean respirable air from another source. Respirators that fall into this category include airline respirators, which use compressed air from a remote source; and self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA), which include their own air supply.

Respirators should only be used when engineering control systems are not feasible. Engineering control systems, such as adequate ventilation or scrubbing of contaminants are the preferred control methods for reducing worker exposures.

NIOSH issues recommendations for respirator use. Industrial type approvals are in accordance to the NIOSH federal respiratory regulations 42 CFR Part 84. Development of respirator standards are in concert with various partners from government and industry.

Excerpted from subsection ‘Respirators’ under the Workplace Safety & Health Topics area of the website of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a subsidiary of the Centers for Disease Control.

photographed in Brooklyn, New York on August 14, 2010

The concept of relative focus on involvement is related to what Bateson (1972) describes as the double bind in communication — a phenomenon that he introduced to account for pathology but that, Scollon (1982) demonstrates, characterizes all human communication. As rephrased by Becker (1982), humans continually subject each other to simultaneous conflicting messages to the effect that “You are like me” and “You are not me,” or, put another way, “I want to be close to you” and “I want to be separate from you.” These two conflicting messages necessarily grow out of the conflicting human needs to be connected to other people and to be distant from them — that is, not to be engulfed by closeness.

Indeed, humans are not the only creatures caught in this double bind. Bettelheim (1979) cites the example of porcupines who seek shelter in a cave during a cold winter. They huddle together for warmth, but their quills prick each other, so they pull away. Then they get cold again. They must continually adjust their closeness and distance in order to balance their simultaneous but conflicting needs to be close to each other and not to get pricked.

Excerpted from ‘Relative Focus on Involvement in Oral and Written Discourse’ by Deborah Tannen. Appearing in Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature of Consequences of Reading and Writing, edited by David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance and Angela Hildyard. Published by Cambridge University Press, New York, 1985.

photographed at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, New York on November 25, 2010

Myths and rituals are the stories and practices that define a culture. A myth is a story with symbolic elements that represents a culture’s ideals. Each culture creates its own stories to help its members understand the world. Many companies (and perhaps most advertising agencies) are in a sense in the myth business; they tell us stories that we collectively absorb. Some marketers tell these stories more overtly than others: Disney stages about two thousand Cinderella weddings every year; the princess bride wears a tiara and rides to the park’s lakeside wedding pavilion in a horse-drawn coach, complete with two footmen in gray wigs and gold lamé pants. And the Shrek movies remind us that even the ugliest suitor can land the princess if his heart is in the right place. To appreciate some more of the “popular culture gods” we worship, just tune in to next year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and observe the huge balloon figures floating by.

Excerpted from Launch! Advertising and Promotion in Real Time by Michael Solomon. Published by Flat World Knowledge, Nyack, New York, 2010.

photographed in Paris, France on September 21, 2009

The photographer can merely show the clock’s hands, but he does choose his moments. “I was there, and this is what life was at the moment I saw it.” These people who actually participate in life—these Europeans—might at first glance all look alike, to a Hottentot, say, or a Chinese peasant; but if one were to compare our lands, square mile for square mile, it would probably be here that one would find the greatest number of of differences in historical and geographical origins. Our need for joy and good will, and our savageness too, are manifested through minute and infinitely numerous details. These details strike us with their novelty, but also with their familiarity, almost like memories. We feel we recognize them amid our general impressions—a bit like being in a museum for the first time, but a museum in which we know certain paintings from reproductions. Finding ourselves face-to-face with one of these paintings, we experience the shock of surprise, and also the joy of sizing it up for an actual confrontation.

Excerpted from ‘Europeans,’ an essay appearing in The Mind’s Eye, Writings on Photography and Photographers by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Published by Aperture, New York, 1999.

photographed on August 14, 2010 in Manhattan, New York

A more complex justification of anti-homeless policies characterizes them as a means of preventing crime. This idea is based on the “Broken Windows” theory proposed by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in a now-classic article in The Atlantic Monthly. Wilson and Kelling argue that allowing indications of disorder, such as a broken window, to remain unaddressed demonstrates a loss of public order and control, and often apathy, in the neighborhood and thus breeds further, and more serious, criminal activity. This theory has served as the basis for crackdowns on “quality of life” and other minor offenses in several cities. In New York City, for example, Mayor Giuliani and police officials have initiated a campaign to curb minor infractions in the city’s subway system and elsewhere as a means of decreasing more serious crime.

This approach, however, raises serious concerns about basic fairness. First, punishing one group of people to prevent future criminal activity by others runs afoul of the basic notions of equality underlying our criminal justice system. More importantly, in relying on police to distinguish between desirable and undesirable elements in the community, there is no way to ensure that the criteria they use to make these distinctions will not be invidious or impermissible ones. Indeed, Wilson and Kelling themselves noted the difficulty in ensure that “the police do not become agents of neighborhood bigotry.” The likely success of the only safeguard suggested by the authors — appropriate selection, training, and supervision of police officers — is belied by examples of discriminatory enforcement of criminal laws and ordinances by police officers across the country.

Excerpted from Out of Sight — Out of Mind? A Report on Anti-Homeless Laws, Litigation and Alternatives in 50 United States Cities. Published by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, Washington, D.C., January 1999.

photographed in Washington, D.C., on July 17, 2010

Judd Herbert, Metatheatre 2, concentrates on the duplicity inherent in theatrical discourse as “combining overt mimetic representations of the story with covert performative and metadramatic clues pointed to its own operations at the risk of undermining or at the very least problematizing the fable.” In the simplest cases metatheatre involves “linguistic signs that, in addition to communicating developments in plot and characterization, explicitly designate the art of stagecraft and entertainment.” (The subsequent discussion shows, however, that he does not intend to exclude ambiguity or polysemy of the linguistic sign from his metatheatrical inventory.) Going beyond the notion of a dramatic “anti-form” in which the barrier between art and life is dissolved, Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama 5, intends “metadrama” in broader terms to comprehend the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are about “dramatic art itself—its materials, its media of language and theatre, its generic forms and conventions, its relationship to truth and the social order.” Such observations are common in metatheatrical criticism; cf. Gruber, “Systematized Delirium” 99: “Aristophanes’ real subject is drama, for his plays may be best understood as forming an ongoing self-conscious discourse on theatre.”

Excerpted from Figures of Play: Greek Drama and Metafictional Poetics, footnote 40, by Gregory W. Dobrov. Published by Oxford University Press, New York, 2001.

photographed over Miami, Florida on April 9, 2010

… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such a Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which conceded point for point with it. The following Generations, which were so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that the vast Map was Useless, and not with out some Pitilessness in it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are tattered ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

The full text of ‘On Exactitude in Science’ by Jorge Luis Borges, fictionally attributed to Suárez Miranda in Viajes de varones prudentes. Translated by Andrew Hurley, published by Penguin Books, New York, 1998.

photographed near Choc Beach, St. Lucia on April 8, 2010

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress. We went out one night on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.

She was Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly, of the Caughlins first, English-Irish bankers, financiers and priests; the Mangaravidis, a Sicilian issue from the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs; Kelly’s family was just Kelly; but he had made a million two hundred times. So there was a vision of treasure, far-off blood, and fear. The night I met her we had a wild ninety minutes in the back seat of my car parked behind a trailer truck on a deserted factory street in Alexandria, Virginia. Since Kelly owned part of the third largest trucking firm in the Midwest and West, I may have had a speck of genius to try for his daughter where I did. Forgive me. I thought the road to President might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart. She heard the snake rustle however in my heart; on the telephone the next morning she told me I was evil, awful and evil, and took herself back to the convent in London where she had lived at times before. I did not know as yet that ogres stand on guard before the portal of an heiress. Now in retrospect I can say with cheer: that was the closest I came to being President. (By the time I found Deborah again—all of seven years later in Paris—she was no longer her father’s delight, and we were married in a week. Like any tale that could take ten books, it is best to quit it by a parenthesis—less than ten volumes might be untrue.)

Excerpted from An American Dream by Norman Mailer. Published by Vintage, New York, 1999.

photographed off the California coast on June 12, 2009

The bird in its flight without the help of the wind drops half the wing downwards, and thrusts the other half towards the tip backwards; and the part which is moved down prevents the descent of the bird, and that which goes backwards drives the bird forwards.

When the bird raises its wings it brings their extremities near together; and while lowering them it spreads them further apart during the first half of the movement, but after this middle stage as they continue to descend it brings them together again.

When the bird lowers one of its wings necessity constrains it instantly to extend it, for if it did not do so it would turn right over. The bird when it wishes to turn does not beat its wings with equal movement, but moves the one which makes the convex of the circle it describes, more than that which makes the concave of the circle.

Excerpted from Leonard Da Vinci’s Note-Books, arranged and rendered into English, with introductions, by Edward McCurdy. Published by Charles Scribner and Sons, New York, 1906.