Interesting Links for 17-8-2011

[andrewducker]

• How to see Facebook events in your Google calendar
  (tags: facebook google calendars)
• Your awful dates, in 140 characters
  (tags: funny dating twitter)
• $80 Android Phone Sells Like Hotcakes in Kenya
  (tags: android africa kenya mobile_phones)
• Unemployed people forced into unpaid work at Tesco, Primark and other multinationals
  (tags: welfare uk unemployment slavery)
• IE 9 best option against Web-based malware attacks
  (tags: browser internet security)
• 30% of passengers take longer routes as London's Tube map misrepresents distances between stations
  (tags: maps london visualization mapping)
• My rapist doesn't know he's a rapist.
  (tags: rape slutwalk society)
• Happily Ever After: How to build the perfect relationship
  (tags: relationships marriage love advice)
• Evil publisher ploys #36122 - promising to show your manuscript to JK Rowling
  (tags: jkrowling publishing evil)
• Why didn't the riots reach Scotland?
  (tags: riots scotland)
• Apple, Amazon etc. sued for fixing prices on ebooks
  (tags: ebooks apple amazon business)

Comments

[matgb]

I love that Kenya story, but does show where some of the big market share distortion stuff is coming from.

A year ago, those Android sales would've been Nokia featurephones at the more basic end, so in Kenya alone 'smartphone' sales are up by 350K, hence Android has a massive market share due to expanding market at the lower end-that's, obviously, a damn good thing, but it doesn't half distort the raw figures.

I'm also not at all happy with the spin ont hat corp watch story, it's basically "corporations are evil and, oh, small businesses and charities do that too, but they're not evil". The New Deal is hardly a new thing, they finally noticed that forcing people to go work to keep their benefits involves, well, forcing them to go to work to keep their benefits. Well done there.

New Deal's being reformed, and FJF is gone, which is the two sources of the forced work.

[andrewducker]

I basically disapprove if they aren't being paid minimum wage. I wouldn't object to the government subdividing the first few months of their employment, but if purple are working they should be paid properly for it.

[matgb]

I agree ('purple working? autocorrect?). If they're just getting benefits, then the Govt should be paying benefit to employer and employee getting paid normally by employer at full equivalent wage-a subsidised work placement is fine by me, but below legal minimum work is wrong.

There have always been flaws with the New Deal, it surprises me that it's come up as a heavily linked story now given it was a flagship 1997 policy. I suspect it's "evil Tories did this" from some of the kneejerkers on the left linking it everywhere, but it's a really old scandal.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Awww, I like that I influenced a link today!

[andrewducker]

Indeedy :->

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, most tube stations have _lots_ of maps. They could easily have _both_ topological and geographic maps and then you could get an impression of both.

I've also previously suggested ways to improve the tube map without changing the layout, by representing distance with a thinker or thinner line, or with longer or shorter dashes on the line, but that's probably too complicated.

[simont]

I wonder if the simplest thing is just to collect data on which journeys are the most commonly misjudged, and issue a few pieces of simple advice of the form "If you're going from [here] to [there], go via the Piccadilly line instead of the Juiblee". If it turned out that most of the misjudged journeys could be summed up in two or three rules of thumb of that form, then it would surely be easier to just do so than to try to improve on the classic and much loved Tube map!

[atreic.livejournal.com]

I have always been told to count (stops + 2 * changes) for the tube. And applying this to the journey that they said people all got wrong makes it clear that the wrong way is wrong. I wonder if there are routes where my formula gives the wrong answer?

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Don't they do this for a few popular destinations already?

I'm sure I've seen signs up at a tube station or two saying "If you're going to this popular tourist destination, take this route..." I can't remember if it was at mainline train station I saw this or one of the very busy central london stations.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Sacrificing geographical accuracy is one of the original design goals of the map. The research about what people do is interesting, but the article seems to miss this key point.

The whole of the top left section of the map is squished out of shape, for instance. West Hampstead and all that are much further to the south-west than they appear to be; Uxbridge and all that likewise. I don't think the map -- technically, in TfL usage, diagram -- is meant to be one's sole guide. You should probably have a rough idea of the geography of where you're going to get the best of both worlds.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it's a visualisation, not a map. Getting something that can tell you the fastest way to get from A to B in a pretty manner would be nice, but getting all of the information on the diagram in a manner that's easily digestible is clearly the primary goal.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

You could have larger versions of the maps in the station that had the travel time in minutes on the coloured lines between stations.

Of course, then people would need to be able to add up in order to work out longer journies, and that seems unlikely.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Okay, serious web-layout rant here: who the [bleep] decided that the best way to display a web site is to have it occupy the middle third of the screen with the other 2/3 just whitespace? (re: "Unemployed people" link) Yay for extra vertical scrolling and a much smaller and squintier font size.

Why don't they just go back to the geocities days and use more "blink" tags? It's simpler to code* and just as annoying/unreadable.

-- Steve begrudges these idiots the brief pageview of his that rewards them for their phail.

*and to filter out, at least for a hack-amateur like me

[andrewducker]

I agree about the font size, but I like things that don't require my eyes to travel far. I've got my journal set up to only use the middle 50% of the screen because that way I can read it a lot quicker, with minimal head/eye movement.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

That IE9 link is slightly misleading - IE9 is best at *blocking known malicious sites altogether* according to that link. That's only one part of protecting against malware, of course, and what it doesn't say is how vulnerable the browsers were to attack once the user actually gets to a malware site. If IE9 protects against 99.9% of known malware sites, but everything in the other 0.1% affects it, while Chrome (say) doesn't protect against any but also doesn't have any exploits that can be used by the malware, then IE9 is still far worse.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

"Unemployed people forced into unpaid work at Tesco, Primark and other multinationals"

Hm. If I'm unemployed, having _something_ useful to do -- preferably something non-soul-destroying -- is positive. But many plans seem to focus on it as a punishment "we don't know who's malingering, so we're going to make being unemployed as humiliating as possible so people won't admit to it unless they have to." And have no provisions for people who ARE actively looking for work and/or have specific disabilities. And somehow giant chains don't seem like they're desperately in need of even cheaper labour, how about getting people to work for, say, charities?

[andrewducker]

How about paying them the minimum wage for the work?

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

The obvious counter-argument to that is "well, then the supermarket won't play ball - they'd prefer to interview for their minimum-wage workers - and the gov't can't afford to pay minimum wage to all those people".

A more stringent eye on if the people forced onto workfare are actually gaining useful skills might be a good idea. Again, difficult to implement, though.

[andrewducker]

I'd be fine with the government subsiding, say, the first 6 months of employment. So the supermarket gets them cheap while it trains them up, the government gets them skilled up a little (and used to getting out of bed) and the individual gets the skills and some more cash. Everyone's a winner!

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

this sounds sensible.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Cost implications.

Even assuming that the supermarket pays, say, half of the minimum wage, the gov't is still doubling the amount of money it's paying to the people on this scheme. Multiply that up and the scheme starts costing serious money, and then the Tory base (and UKIP) start asking questions about why we're spending more money to coddle these scroungers, etc, etc.

I agree, it would be a fairer and probably better system, but I'm not sure it's tenable in the current political climate.

Also, the supermarkets and other multinationals may have already been approached about paying something into the scheme, and may have simply refused. It depends how badly they need cheap, unskilled labour.

[andrewducker]

Is it still doubling it, considering that it doesn't have to pay housing benefit any more? I'd like to see some total cost breakdowns for that kind of thing. I might do a proper post on this tonight and see if I can get some better feedback from people!

[atreic.livejournal.com]

I think it's a good idea! But they should get the bottom of the payscale for the job they're doing (which may be more than minimum wage).

Although 'the government pays them more' fixes the 'these people are exploited' problem but doesn't fix the 'this undercuts the market for people who are genuinely trying to do this job as a job'

[andrewducker]

This is true. And it would need to be done only for jobs that were genuinely minimum wage.

Of course, if Tesco values experience then after 6 months they'd want to pay you a bit more than minimum wage anyway, to avoid you running off to get another job.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Experience scales badly with many unskilled labour jobs.

Looking purely at the bottom line, even assuming the multinational is paying a full half of the salary for the 6-month placement, would it be more efficient to pay a) the full salary for the person who's been with you for 6 months or b) half that for a new recruit?

I don't think that shelf-stackers, for example, become twice as efficient after six months.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. Not having to pay housing benefit would probably mean that they're basically paying out the same amount if they can negotiate the companies recieving the free labour up to paying half.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

That ebook thing is pretty funny, given the situation in the UK where they're very frequently more expensive due to the VAT.

The tube thing is also funny, because it shows as well how little people are prepared to try and walk around London at times, which I always think is a bit sad.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Back before I retired, I worked at the Los Angeles County Arboretum, in charge of the greenhouses. At times, The Board of Supervisors were enthusiastic about assigning us "Workfare" people, and I was required to supervise a number of them. I was expected to see to it that they did something useful, or at least looked as though they were so occupied, didn't malinger conspicuously, and did no damage (this list not necessarily in order of importance acto my priorities). I like to think of myself as a reasonably conscientious person, and I think I did a fair job of this. But it took something like 50% of the time I'd normally have devoted to the skilled work for which I was being paid almost as much as people in the commercial sector were. I think that, over-all, the Arboretum/County suffered a net loss from this.

Most of those "Workfare" assignees were nice people, but it sure seemed to me that the vast majority of them were -- intellectually and psychologically -- simply (& pitifully) incapable of holding down a full-time job, no matter how menial, so the whole Program seemed to be a Feel Good Thing for The Establishment. (That was, of course, in an era of low unemployment, so what we were getting was people on the bad end of the bell-curve.)

[andrewducker]

Yup - it's good for (most) people to feel they're doing something useful, and good for (many) taxpayers to feel they're getting something for their money, but I'm not convinced that it adds much to overall productivity.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

The thing about the journey from Paddington to Bond Street is interesting, because Paddington is effectively the different tube stations: Bakerloo, Hammersmith & City, and now misnamed Circle. It is very hard to change between H & C and the others. Most travellers arriving at Paddington are much closer to Circle and Bakerloo platforms than H&C.

Based on the map, the obvious route would be Bakerloo to Baker St, then Jubilee. My guess is that it would be quicker, too.

TfL have been very good at freeing up data: someone told me that they were allowed access to the data created by the Boris bikes during last summer's tube strikes.