Interesting Links for 13-6-2011

[andrewducker]

• MRI scans of teenage brains find correlations to pop song success
  (tags: psychology brains music teenagers)
• homophobia associated with homosexual arousal.
  (tags: psychology homophobia homosexuality lgbt funny sexuality)
• Laser is produced by a living cell - now _this_ is biotechnology.
  (tags: biology lasers TheFuture)
• Universal Credit benefits system will leave thousands of famillies worse off (working ones with children, by the looks of things)
  (tags: uk welfare family)
• Twitter continues its habit of taking away accounts without warning or discussion
  (tags: twitter)
• Blogger arrested for recording a public meeting.
  (tags: democracy law police wales)
• Vince Cable on the economy
  (tags: VinceCable economics uk)
• Iceland crowdsources its next constitution
  (tags: iceland politics constitution democracy)
• IP logging, internet privacy, geolocation, and you: facts to consider
  (tags: internet privacy location)

Comments

[matgb]

See, Twitter's TOS are clear, if you set up an account for something that isn't you, then if the real person/thing comes along, you lose that account name.

But to shut it down completely, remove all the stuff from public display, and not tell the person who's accoount it is? That's crap. Especially seeing as they just gave it to random company number 1 that's based in the area and asked for it, not even the actual bridge.

I'm very suspicious of the 'blogger arrested' thing, pretty much everyone says that when the police arrived she 'tried to make her case' and didn't stop filming. Technically, if you're asked to stop doing something on private property, and refuse to do so even when the police ask you to, that is a breach of the peace. Does it suck? Yes. Is the law being applied badly? Yes.

Was she sensible in the way she behaved? Probably not, there are ways and ways for these things, and each council is free to set its own rules on what they want to happen inside their own buildings--elected people, kick em out for being secretive arseholes.

Definitely like the Iceland approach, one to watch, have always favoured a Citizen's Convention for the UK, combine that with a lot of crowdsourced analysis and you could do a lot of interesting things.

[andrewducker]

I'd be fine with Twitter renaming the account to something else. But just to delete it all is pretty sucky.

[matgb]

Aye, it'd make a lot more sense to eminent domain the name but keep the account as something else, given we can rename at any point that'd be fair.

At some point they're going to do it to someone who happens to share a name with someone famous, and that'd really suck.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

It's no secret that most homophobes want dick.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Nice to have it conclusively proved with science though.

And by 'nice', I mean, jolly amusing.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Intriguingly, Google thinks that Vince Cable invented the phrase "converting a hospital pass into a try".

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I have _no_ idea what that was about.

I'd have advised him to avoid mentioning anything to do with healthcare too...

[skington.livejournal.com]

It's a rugby term. Hospital pass = ridiculously high and slow pass that's almost begging to be intercepted by the other team.

[andrewducker]

Aaaah. Thank you!

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

In my dialect, it's a pass that the recipient does not have the opportunity to do anything with before the opposition tackles them.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, that sounds plausible also. Either way, "converting a hospital pass into a try" is very much a case of "going from fucked to awesome".

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Or a pass that is such that the recipient is likely to be heavily clobbered and therefore end up in hospital.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

I learned a lot from that thing about IP logging, because I was starting from a very low knowledge base. In particular I learned that I had dodged a bullet with my policy of never setting up specific friends views, and should not go ahead with my plan to introduce a special one called "View including Andrew Ducker's really really boring posts".

[andrewducker]

I never get offended by people who have me on unusually named friends lists. I'm happy I'm being read at all.

(I will admit to having an OtherPeople custom friends view - but that's just because I had too many people on my People flist and decided to split it.)