Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-27-2010

[andrewducker]

• How one woman can cause economic boom or bust - and why a change in employment of 0.1% is meaningless
  (tags: statistics jobs analysis economy)
• Average intelligence predicts atheism rates across 137 nations
  (tags: religion intelligence atheism)
• Lake Agassiz - the giant prehistoric lake
  Why had I never heard of this?
  (tags: geography history map)
• Why bonuses and performance pay are a bad idea
  I'd link directly to the FT article, but I've had my total allocation of articles for the month.
  (tags: reward business finance)
• The Traceability of an Anonymous Online Comment (very, very high)
  (tags: privacy anonymity freespeech internet surveillance)
• BBC to re-create the sinking of Atlantis a la 300
  (tags: atlantis history bbc)
• Apparently Dr Who is kinky...
  (tags: DrWho EpicFail)
• Air stewardess revealed as part time porn star, keeps job. Huzzah!
  (tags: porn feminism liberty)
• Demonstrating web security - and just how easy it is to hack many systems.
  (tags: security database hacking sql sqlinjection)
• January Was Hottest Ever
  (tags: weather climate climatechange)
• "Mad Libs" Style Form is filled in up to 40% more often than normal webform.
  (tags: forms usability ui webdesign design web)
• How the normalising of homosexuality affected one person's Valentine's Day
  (tags: cute valentines_day homosexuality society)

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Check out Hard Facts, Half Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, which has rather a lot about the usually destructive effects of performance bonuses, and more generally, about the damage done by management which is trying to prove that it is and should be in charge.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Bookmarked for the future: looks very interesting.

I suspect bonuses don't so much predict or encourage high performance as they do boom and bust high risk schemes that "mimic" high performance but can have huge consequences.

Will see what the book says.

[drplokta]

Thanks for the webform link -- looks very interesting, and I've sent it to some of my colleagues at work.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm betting that the narrative forms get into common use, the odds of them being used will drop to the same level you see for standard forms-- the current greater use is a little about the friendliness, but mostly about about novelty.

[andrewducker]

I'd love to know how well it works for you. There's already been a discussion on Hacker News of someone trying a followup that didn't get the desired results, along with theories as to why this might be.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

The comments to that atheism/IQ article are largely moronic. 'Who cares? What is on average in this matter does not interest me. This has become a confession of faith to atheist liberals. I hope it makes them less perceptive of their decline, more overconfident, more blunt, more arrogant and more clinging to their false beliefs. Average is to them a way of avoiding the details. Averages often seem to "support" hegemonic ideology. By the way, have you noticed that probability of God arises from atheist physics?' Yes, that's certainly a convincing argument. And I'm not even an atheist.

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

How the normalising of homosexuality affected one person's Valentine's Day
Amen!!!!

[marrog.livejournal.com]

How the normalising of homosexuality affected one person's Valentine's Day

Although how many people would still think she was a weirdo if they knew she was poly? Plus ça change...

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

Poorly designed incentive systems don't work & they are incredibly difficult to get right.

What do organisations do with this knowledge, however? Taking a basic sales role in financial services, the base is likely to be relatively low. If an orgnisation removes the incentives (which may be substantial), do they then increase the base pay & by how much? How much will someone (who is probably fairly risk-seeking) be willing to sacrifice potential reward for certainty?

I'd be interested to understand what the media & the public would think about large increases to base salaries. I suspect the longer term incentives & clawback systems might be more acceptable all round.

[awdrey-gore.livejournal.com]

The normalising of homosexuality and Valentine's Day was sweet and thought provoking until the end, where the MEN AND THEIR SPORTS, THINK THEY WANNA DO EACH OTHER UP THE ASS stereotype came in.

Bleah.

[broin.livejournal.com]

I agree with the piggy.