Interesting Links for 21-3-2011

[andrewducker]

• Lower drink-drive limit rejected - but other measures being brought into place to reduce deaths.
  (tags: drinking alcohol drugs driving uk)
• Absolutely fascinating article on the future of long-form journalism (i.e. 4000+ word articles)
  (tags: journalism news reading)
• University gains accreditation by starting own accreditors. Now that's thinking different!
  (tags: academia fraud)
• MIT has dramatically increased equality for women - with some interesting consequences.
  (tags: education feminism MIT usa academia)
• How to Fill In Your Census Form without Lockheed Martin Profiting (long version) (Not advocating this, just amused)
  (tags: census politics uk)
• Test can spot high risk for type 2 diabetes up to ten years before symptoms appear.
  (tags: diabetes medicine health)
• Blue Labour: The Labour Party's radical answer to the Big Society?
  (tags: labour politics uk local)
• War on drugs has failed, say former heads of MI5, CPS and BBC
  (tags: Uk drugs)
• A radiation dose chart.
  (tags: radiation science health nuclear infographics visualization)
• The Good The Bad and the Ugly of Video Games [COMIC]
  (tags: webcomic computer_games funny)
• The new adulthood: Extended parental support as a safety net
  (tags: adult children)
• Government buries good news about NHS
  (tags: government nhs)
• Actor accidentally reveals villain in new Spider-Man film
  (tags: spiderman)
• Gay, and wish you weren't? There's an app for that!
  (tags: apple apps homophobia lgbt)
• The main writers of Aladdin talk about it. Fascinating look behind the scenes - especially "visceral storytelling"
  (tags: aladdin animation movies disney writing)

Comments

[birguslatro]

Long form journalism:

So, they're suggesting the way the Watergate reporting could be funded now is by an organization other than the publishers? The Democratic Party, perhaps?

The problem to be solved as I see it is that journalists want to be part of the mainstream conversation on whatever topic it is they're covering, which means their articles need to be freely available to everybody. But there's not enough money in free, so endless convoluted methods based around subscriptions and the like are tried.

And I encountered one of those subscriber methods today. I wanted to show someone an article in a local freebee paper, so I looked to see if it was online. And the paper was, but only this week's edition was freely available, the older ones requiring you to sign up to see. I mean, they stick paper versions of these in our letter boxes without us even asking for them, then lock away the online older versions?

Maybe they should try it the other way round. Paper newspapers and to a lesser extent paper magazines were usually read and then thrown out. Few people had room to keep newspapers going back for years, that's for sure.

So, put your articles behind a subscription wall, but not for longer than 24 to 48 hours. That'd make any effort to pirate them hardly worth the effort, while those who absolutely felt they needed the news as it happened would consider a subscription worth their while.

And you'd get advertising revenue from all your old articles for ever more. As apposed to them being used as wrapping paper for fish and chips like in the good old days.

(And no, it won't surprise me if this has already been tried.)

[star-tourmaline.livejournal.com]

I am traumatised by this appearing on my friends' list in the evening.

[andrewducker]

Tell me about it! I ended up logging a support incident with Delicious.com, asking why the daily posting wasn't working!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Buying your own accreditation bureau because no legitimate one will accredit you has a long history. Brigham Young University did it, for example, although they at least pretend to teach, and they loan their bought-and-paid-for-bureau out to other "faith schools".

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

What, really? I thought BYU was accredited by Northwest - i.e. one of the big six regional accrediting bodies and as pukka and academically rigorous as they come. I don't doubt they had issues back when they started, but not since before the war, I don't think.

You're not confusing them with Bob Jones University? Which is way dodgier and SFAIK has a slightly-iffy accrediting body along the lines you suggest.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I might be. I know BYU was denied accreditation repeatedly and had to go shopping for a board - but I thought they'd actually *bought* a board and changed the standards to get accredited, not simply found one that would pass them.

So I might be confusing them with Bob Jones.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I really think you have the wrong university in mind there.

So far as I know, Brigham Young University has been accredited since before the war, and by the appropriate regional accrediting body, pretty much since that system emerged. Sorry for spelling this out if you know it, but there are six regional accrediting bodies in the US, and you don't get to shop around: you are accredited (or not!) by the one for your geographic area. There are various national accrediting bodies of varying rigour, including several that specifically accredit religious institutions; these are generally seen as being less academic and prestigious. BYU is accredited through the regional system, not a national religious body. Northwest Association is the appropriate one for Utah, and SFAICT BYU has been accredited by them since forever.

Their list of accreditations valid for 2009/10 (quickest I found) starts off with Northwest, then goes on to list their many and extensive accreditations for their various degree programs. They are on a 10-year reaccreditation cycle, were last re-accredited in 2006; before that, I found an announcement that their accreditation was renewed for a further 10 years in 1996, so it's evidently been in force since at least 1986. (The web don't go back further than that.)

There's controversy about their accreditation, notably from the AAUP (the US equivalent of the UK's UCU), who raise pretty serious issues about academic freedom - basically, BYU has a code of conduct that you'd expect of a pretty strict wholly Mormon outfit in Utah. And they do enforce it (not uncontroversially). But Northwest's policy (and the AAUP's 1940 statement) is clear: you're allowed to curtail academic freedom, so long as you make it explicit.

I profoundly disagree with BYU's stance in that regard. And I'd expect that anyone with a BYU qualification related to biology or theology would have a background in the Mormon version of those topics, rather than a secular one.

But outside those areas, their scholarship and academic standing is very good.

Sorry to go off on one, but there's a guy from BYU in my field who's one of the big noises, and you could not legitimately say that his scholarship - whether teaching or research - lacks rigour. He - and BYU more widely - are deeply religious, but also great scholars.

If you've evidence to show that BYU has been denied accreditation - especially recently - I'd be very interested to hear about it.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I wasn't thinking "recently", I was thinking "originally". Like, "many moons ago", like "when people started thinking that maybe letting any yahoo claim to be able to give out doctorates was possibly bad".

But I'm going to have to look up my details, because while I was sure it was BYU that got denied "real" accreditation and set itself up with "non-rigorous religious-school accreditation by virtue of paying for the accreditation board", it would appear that I'm wrong, especially since they've got real accreditation now.

And that means I'm wondering who the fuck it *was*. Making a note to self to look it up, now.

My comment about how "at least they pretend to teach" really was meant to mean "but they're not a place to buy fake degrees - you can get a real education there are along as you avoid the classes where the facts contradict their religion."

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The Good The Bad and the Ugly of Video Games [COMIC]

If only all those people buying MW2 and Blops had read this, they'd know they were wrong to buy it because it is a bad game :-D

[marrog.livejournal.com]

How to Fill In Your Census Form without Lockheed Martin Profiting (long version) (Not advocating this, just amused)

Oh, this is going to be fun...

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Mind you, my worry would be that they'll just consider unscannable forms collateral damage and bin them, and I don't want to ruin the data... is there a guarantee somewhere that they do actually manually enter unscannable forms?

[andrewducker]

I would have thought that they would have to input all of them. If we have to fill them in by law, I'd be surprised if they could then just throw them away.

However, I've seen something which indicates that it's the census workers who are going to be doing this - and that they're being paid an overall fee, not an hourly rate. Don't know how to corroborate this though.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

If you mean the comment on that post it was quickly refuted as utter bollocks, probably by a plant commenter. You legally can't pay people a flat fee for an unlimited amount of work unless they're freelance - not very likely for this sort of job, and adverts have been seen for this work all of which are paid hourly. They'll be paid an hourly rate. (Unless you have more info than I do.)

In my experience of data entry data entry supers tend to give you hourly quotas to make, but if you don't make them there's nothing they can do other than either revise their quotas or get rid of you - and I would expect the former in a scenario where everyone is being slowed down as we would expect here. They don't get to dock you pay or work unpaid overtime for not getting through all your work. (Unless you're a wuss and let them of course, but people ought to know their rights.)

No, if anything we'd be doing them a favour - more work, more pay, a more interesting and varied job, and that government money coming back into the UK - we'd be doing our bit to help the economy! I don't think I'm going to go the full hog as suggested, mind you - I think eradicating the bar codes (but helpfully writing the address on each page - I don't want to waste any of my time making someone come out and see me) and maybe writing the whole in a lovely neat cursive will be quite enough to take up a little more of someone's time.

[andrewducker]

Aha! That's probably where it was - the site seems to have vanished, so I couldn't check.

Let me know how your plans work out - I'd love to know if it works.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Oh, so it has. That's... interesting.

Or, you know, maybe it isn't. But it might be.

[andrewducker]

Yup. Might have just exceeded their bandwidth, or sinister forces might be at work.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

It's highly unlikely Lockheed Martin intend to process the forms themselves. Far more likely they have sub-contracted the actual scanning work to a third party - a company that does this regularly. It's also highly unlikely Lockheed Martin will take the financial risk of the amount of work being greater than expected. It will depend on the terms of the contract, but I would expect LM to have mitigated that risk by passing it onto their sub-contractor.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

The document Andy linked to is pretty extensively referenced; the folk researching this seem to have done quite a lot of reading around the topic and I'd hazard that they would have cottoned onto this loophole?

I did consider it, though - the 'but what if you're just making more work for some sub-contracted company' issue. And I concluded that either way it employs more data-entry assistants for longer hours, and creating more work for those people sounds good to me - in an entirely un-sarcastic, 'people really need work right now' sense. If it ends up not costing LM/CACI any extra cash at least it'll put a bit more cash in the pockets of some underpayed desk monkeys.

[kerrypolka.livejournal.com]

I didn't know Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio wrote Aladdin! They are two of my favorite action-adventure film writers ever (they also did the Antonio Banderas/Anthony Hopkins Zorro film, and the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy). They write really excellent and funny swash and buckle, and tend to do pretty good women characters, too.

[andrewducker]

They also did an early pass at a Sandman movie, I believe. Oh, and Shrek!

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

Two of those links *totally* originated with me. That means I'm famous.

(The census one and the gay app one are both ones I found elsewhere, posted to FB, and then, like, ALL my friends were reposting them.)

That's all xx

[andrewducker]

You are pretty damned fabulous :->