Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-6-2010

[andrewducker]

• 3D printers + new fundraising models lead to amazing new opportunities. Very neat video report from the BBC.
  (tags: video news bbc manufacturing kickstarter)
• People in medieval England twice as well off as those in today’s poorest nations
  (tags: poverty history)
• YouGov produces "You Choose" website to ask people what they would cut from the budget.
  (tags: government uk)
• Wikileaks and the New McCarthyism: Maybe we Just Need a More Open Government
  (tags: wikileaks TransparentSociety diplomacy usa)
• Attractive men are more employable. Attractive women, less so. (Hint: 90% of HR are female)
  (tags: employment business jobs attraction beauty feminism patriarchy)

Comments

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, short fat dudes like me need to work from home where we can pretend to be good looking people and get hired.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

The You Choose website fills me with great fear. It looks to me like a way to excuse the reduction of civil service departments. I haven't clicked through it but I have looked at the results - of course people will pick to not increase the NI and tax, but will instead choose to decrease 'other government departments' even though they have no idea how valuable tohse departments may or may not be.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Here's an example of how important design is: I hardly ever read the links you post to sciencedaily, even though they sound interesting, because the page is just too noisy.

[andrewducker]

I think that the way they make a think column of text snake around the inset is horribly distracting. It's not good design at all.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

The first inset on the left? Yes, exactly. That stops my flow like a brick in the road.

[andrewducker]

Yup. The general clutter I can live with. Many sites seem to think that I want to have the text of interest surrounded by lots of extraneous bobbins, but actually yanking the text out of the way is just silly.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

People in medieval England twice as well off as those in today’s poorest nations

So, the inhabitants of medieval Europe were slightly better off than the inhabitants of modern Afghanistan - that makes perfect sense to me and to me seems to reinforce just how wretched medieval life was.

[andrewducker]

Yup. The fact that we still have people starving to death and dying of trivial diseases is going to place them at a level of wealth below medieval England, where most people were at least managing to eat meat on a semi-regular basis.