Transparency

Although most Canadians are familiar with surveillance cameras and airport security, relatively few are aware of the extent to which the potential for surveillance is now embedded in virtually every aspect of our lives. We cannot walk down a city street, register for a class, pay with a credit card, hop on an airplane, or make a telephone call without data being captured and processed. Where does such information go? Who makes use of it, and for what purpose? Is the loss of control over our personal information merely the price we pay for using social media and other forms of electronic communication, or should we be wary of systems that make us visible—and thus vulnerable—to others as never before? The work of a multidisciplinary research team, Transparent Lives explains why and how surveillance is expanding—mostly unchecked—into every facet of our lives. Through an investigation of the major ways in which both government and private sector organizations gather, monitor, analyze, and share information about ordinary citizens, the volume identifies nine key trends in the processing of personal data that together raise urgent questions of privacy and social justice. Intended not only to inform but to make a difference, the volume is deliberately aimed at a broad audience, including legislators and policymakers, journalists, civil liberties groups, educators, and, above all, the reading public. http://surveillanceincanada.org/

"Transparency," by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, originally published in English in 1964 (in Perspecta 8), followed by a German translation in 1968, is one of the main modern reference texts for any student of architecture. Rowe and Slutzky co-founded the architects group "Texas Rangers" at the University of Texas in Austin, together with John Hejduk, Werner Seligmann and Bernhard Hoesli. In conjunction with their teaching activities, the group members sought to develop a new method for architectural design and proceeded to test their models in the teaching environment. This edition of Transparency is provided with a commentary by Bernhard Hoesli and an introduction by the art and architecture historian Werner Oechslin.

Transformation and perception expert Penney Peirce offers a timely, inspiring, and pioneering book about the path to everyday enlightenment. Focusing on the courage to be vulnerable, authentic, and exposed, Transparency offers a way to rapidly become your absolute best self. There is great power in being seen for all of who you are—and for being able to see through the superficial, often-messy top layer of reality to find core truth, beautiful souls, and our expanded capacity as human beings. The fourth book in Penney Peirce’s award-winning Transformation series, with a poignant foreword by Jenny Blake, Transparency dives into some of the last phases of personal and societal transformation. Thought-provoking, reassuring, and motivating, Peirce shows readers how to dissolve old habits, fears, and fixed beliefs—our emotional and mental “clutter”—that interfere with the soul’s clarity. It’s honesty, simplicity, compassion, and true humility that produce genius, not ego and control. We’re used to living in physical bodies in an opaque world, and rarely see through to what’s real. By transforming the dense reality into a transparent one, where secrets, lies, and hiding are no longer functional, readers learn to relax and discover their best self. When you’re transparent, you can see through situations that blind and confuse others. It’s easy then to reach ideal solutions, important insights, and astounding creativity. Peirce’s vision for how life will change in a transparent reality gives all of us something to aim for.

In Transparency, the authors–a powerhouse trio in the field of leadership–look at what conspires against "a culture of candor" in organizations to create disastrous results, and suggest ways that leaders can achieve healthy and honest openness. They explore the lightning-rod concept of "transparency"–which has fast become the buzzword not only in business and corporate settings but in government and the social sector as well. Together Bennis, Goleman, and O'Toole explore why the containment of truth is the dearest held value of far too many organizations and suggest practical ways that organizations, their leaders, their members, and their boards can achieve openness. After years of dedicating themselves to research and theory, at first separately, and now jointly, these three leadership giants reveal the multifaceted importance of candor and show what promotes transparency and what hinders it. They describe how leaders often stymie the flow of information and the structural impediments that keep information from getting where it needs to go. This vital resource is written for any organization–business, government, and nonprofit–that must achieve a culture of candor, truth, and transparency.

Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world. Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies.

Today, transparency is a widely heralded value, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often held up as one of the transparency movement’s canonical achievements. Yet while many view the law as a powerful tool for journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to pursue the public good, FOIA is beset by massive backlogs, and corporations and the powerful have become adept at using it for their own interests. Close observers of laws like FOIA have begun to question whether these laws interfere with good governance, display a deleterious anti-public-sector bias, or are otherwise inadequate for the twenty-first century’s challenges. Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad—how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved. Contributors investigate the creation of FOIA; its day-to-day uses and limitations for the news media and for corporate and citizen requesters; its impact on government agencies; its global influence; recent alternatives to the FOIA model raised by the emergence of “open data” and other approaches to transparency; and the theoretical underpinnings of FOIA and the right to know. In addition to examining the mixed legacy and effectiveness of FOIA, contributors debate how best to move forward to improve access to information and government functioning. Neither romanticizing FOIA nor downplaying its real and symbolic achievements, Troubling Transparency is a timely and comprehensive consideration of laws such as FOIA and the larger project of open government, with wide-ranging lessons for journalism, law, government, and civil society.

The explosion of social media blogs, social networking sites, and video sharing sites has ushered in a new era of digital transparency that puts the power to enhance or destroy a reputation in the hands of the consumer. This timely and practical book shows you how to harness the power of social media with crucial, proven tactics and strategies for every phase of online reputation management. Using step-by-step instruction and tested techniques, the expert authors unveil a detailed blueprint for building, managing, monitoring, and repairing your reputation.

Glass is one of the most ubiquitous and extensively researched building materials. Despite the critical role it has played inmodern architecture in the last century, we have yet to fully comprehend the cultural and technological effects of thiscomplex and sophisticated building material. Engineered Transparency brings together an extraordinary, multidisciplinary group of international architects, engineers, manufacturers, and critics to collectively reconsider glasswithin the context of recent engineering and structural achievements. In light of these advancements, glass hasreemerged as a novel architectural material, offering new and previously unimaginable modes of visual pleasure andspatial experience. Engineered Transparency presents a portfolio of projects featuring cutting-edge glass designs by todays most innovative architects, including SANAA's acclaimed Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, Yoshio Taniguchi's MoMA expansion in New York City, and Steven Holl's Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. With contributions by foremost thinkers in the field of architecture and design including historians Kenneth Frampton, Antoine Picon, and DetlefMertins; cultural critics Beatriz Colomina, Joan Ockman, and Reinhold Martin; engineers Werner Sobek, Guy Nordenson,and Richard Tomasetti; and architects Kazuyo Sejima, Steve Holl, and Elizabeth Diller, Engineered Transparency redefines glass as a 21st century building material and challenges our assumptions about its aesthetic, structural, and spatial potential.