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January 29 2012
January 20 2012
January 01 2012
December 20 2011
December 15 2011
November 18 2011
November 16 2011
Stupidity for the benefit of nobody: UK to force young unemployed people to work for no pay
Under the threat of losing their benefits, which amount to a paltry £53/week, young people in the UK are being bullied into working for no pay for supermarkets and budget stores. The stupidity of this boggles my mind.
Not only are these young people being given a deeply negative working experience but the roles they are filling could (and should) be paid positions. The UK has instituted a low-wage top-up scheme called Working Tax Credit largely to make these marginal jobs viable and now they are forcing people to work there for nothing.
The advertised carrot, with the threat of penury being the unadvertised one, is the chance of an interview at the end of eight weeks unpaid work, and several stores have multiple unemployed young folks competing to be the best floor sweeper in order to win the job at the end of this farrago.
The young woman in the picture above has recently received a BSc in geology and the best we can offer her is unpaid work in a Poundland store. What message are we sending out to our young people with this kind of treatment?
November 10 2011
October 28 2011
October 05 2011
1000-piece stick bomb video
[Video Link] This stick bomb, which winds through a house, is a thing of beauty. I like this YouTube comment: "I just reported this to the Improper Use of Magic Office over at the Ministry of Magic. Have fun going to Azkaban."
From Wikipedia:
A stick bomb is a mechanical spring-loaded device constructed out of flat sticks woven together under tension. Other names for stick bombs include Chinese stick puzzles, and frame bombs.Simple stick bombs made out of four, five, or six sticks have been known to schoolchildren for ages. They were often known as ‘Chinese stick puzzles’ which indicates a possible origin for the devices. In the early 2000s, new methods for creating stick bombs of limitless size were developed.
September 28 2011
Justice to the People
September 21 2011
Marge Simpson's Letter to the First Lady
Barbara Bush, the First Lady of the United States from 1989 to 1993, didn’t think much of The Simpsons, and said so publicly. Marge Simpson took offense and wrote a polite but firm letter objecting to Bush’s characterization of the show as “the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.” The First Lady responded to Mrs. Simpson’s note and apologized for the remark.
Link -via The Mary Sue
September 20 2011
Writing in the New Scientist, Prof. Stephen Reicher, a specialist in crowd psychology at the University of St Andrews, takes aim at the posturing and macho rhetoric after the UK riots that dismissed anyone who sought a sociological expanation for criminal behavior as "excusing crime."
Another way in which politicians have restricted explanation is by intimating that any reaction other than condemnation is tantamount to condoning violence. The UK's education secretary Michael Gove reacted furiously to the suggestion by Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour party, that government policies limiting youth opportunities might have had some relevance, castigating her for "making excuses for what has gone on here". In this context, whole academic disciplines become suspect: in political vocabulary, "sociologist" and "jihadi" have acquired a kind of moral equivalence...Trying to understand the English riots is not a crimeThose politicians and pundits who have tried to outlaw societal explanations of the English riots have advanced alternative theories, largely blaming the violence on the pathology of the rioters. Cameron's declaration that they are inherently criminal and lack moral standards is one variant of this. Another is the common suggestion that the rioters lost their moral standards in the crowd; that they were mindless, swept up by the contagion of the moment or perhaps preyed upon by unscrupulous agitators.
These theories translate into convenient solutions. In the short term, don't try to reason with rioters but use a big stick to repress them; in the longer term, look at the sickness within their communities that has turned them into amoral beasts. That only leaves the question of which communities are dysfunctional and in what ways. Thus Cameron locked horns with former prime minister Tony Blair over whether we should be talking about a broken society or a narrow but recalcitrant underclass.
(Image: London riot police, November 2010, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from hozinja's photostream)
September 18 2011
September 13 2011
Overcoming Selection Bias
During World War II, the Royal Air Force asked Abraham Wald, a statistician, to help decide where armor should be added to the UK’s bombers. The RAF gave Wald information about which parts of its planes were typically hit. Wald’s response was simple, brilliant, and surprising: armor the spots that hadn’t been hit by German fire. Why?
This seems backward at first, but Wald realized his data came from bombers that survived. That is, the British were only able to analyze the bombers that returned to England; those that were shot down over enemy territory were not part of their sample. These bombers’ wounds showed where they could afford to be hit. Said another way, the undamaged areas on the survivors showed where the lost planes must have been hit because the planes hit in those areas did not return from their missions.
Wald assumed that the bullets were fired randomly, that no one could accurately aim for a particular part of the bomber. Instead they aimed in the general direction of the plane and sometimes got lucky. So, for example, if Wald saw that more bombers in his sample had bullet holes in the middle of the wings, he did not conclude that Nazis liked to aim for the middle of wings. He assumed that there must have been about as many bombers with bullet holes in every other part of the plane but that those with holes elsewhere were not part of his sample because they had been shot down.
Link -via Marginal Revolution | Photo by Flickr user Martin Pettitt used under Creative Commons license
Confusing obedience with self-control
It’s an expensive confusion.
We organize our schools around obedience. Tests, comportment, the very structure of the day is about training young people to follow instructions.
We organize our companies around obedience as well. From the resume we use to hire to the training programs to the annual budgets, revenue targets and reviews we create, the model employee is someone who does what he’s told.
And the rationale for this appears to be that at some point, obedience transforms into self-control. That at some point, people start obeying themselves and become leaders. Self-control is without a doubt one of the building blocks of success, a key element of any career worth talking about. We need self-control if we’re going to make a difference.
But help me understand why obedience is the way to get there? Compliant sergeants rarely become great generals.
September 08 2011
Today's comic features SMBC reader/googler Tanya!
It's also loosely based on a conversation I had at the last Beerscussion. Dude I was talking to - I remember everything we talked about, but for some reason at 1:30AM I can't remember your name! If you see this, please send it to me and I'll credit you :)
September 04 2011
no. 464 – @derekasaurus
September 03 2011
Big Eyed Beans from Venus
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
