Interesting Links for 04-05-2012

[andrewducker]

• Judge: An IP-Address Doesn’t Identify a Person (or BitTorrent Pirate)
  (tags: law usa ip piracy copyright )
• I don't remember any company losing the vote on executive pay before. I wonder how they'll react...
  (tags: pay finance business uk )
• If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right
  (tags: money happiness psychology )
• Man has both legs amputated, applies for disability benefit & gets asked: 'So, how far can you walk?'
  (tags: disabilities welfare uk )
• How to report on Pinterest without coming across as horribly sexist.
  (tags: sexism pinterest women internet reporting )
• PE lessons put girls off exercise (and me. I hated them.)
  (tags: sports exercise school gender women )
• Have sleep problems? CBT significantly more effective than drugs, especially in the long-term
  (tags: sleep drugs cbt )
• Cover art and blurb for the new Iain M. Banks Culture novel. Mine is already on order.
  (tags: squee TheCulture IainBanks )
• There are some things that do not require data to back them up.
  (tags: funny comic opinion IceCream )
• Kevin Shields interviewed on the My Bloody Valentine remasters
  (tags: interview music mybloodyvalentine )
• Murdoch has been the bravest media owner in Britain in the last 40 years
  Purely because it's worth hearing the other side of the argument sometimes.
  (tags: RupertMurdoch newspapers uk media )
• A fascinating series of posts on theatre, directing and improvisation
  (tags: improv acting theatre )
• What should we pay MPs? You won't like the answer.
  (tags: uk pay politics )
• Less than half the seats at the last election had Labour and Conservatives in the top two positions
  (tags: uk politics libdem Conservatives labour )
• Why is hazing so common, and what do people get out of it?
  (tags: bullying hazing assault psychology groups membership )
• E-Mail Confused Osama, and 5 Other Revelations From the Bin Laden Files
  (tags: OsamaBinLaden email terrorism technology middle_east )
• One to Two and a half hours jogging per week increases lifespan by six years.
  (tags: jogging exercise health lifespan )
• To Hell With The Lot Of Them (A better post on the elections than I wrote, but much of the same thoughts.)
  (tags: politics scotland )
• Quiet Hands - on forcing people to conform.
  (tags: disability ableism expression children )

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the story about PE putting girls off exercise baffled me a bit too, in my experience PE lessons put *everybody* off exercise. With the possible exception of the one or two kids in each year who were really good at sports, on whom the PE teachers put all of their focus, while the rest of us proles were ridiculed, bullied and generally treated like shit.

... I have zero respect for any of the PE teachers I had at school.

One of them even gave me detention once because I had the temerity to have a letter from my doctor excusing me from doing sports that day because I had a chest infection.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

"PE lessons put girls off exercise (and me. I hated them.)"

I'm fairly sure I'm not parsing this the way it was intended :)

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Coming here from FetLife caused me to read the CBT headline with a completely different meaning than intended.

All I could think was "I've never tried CBT, but I think it would keep me awake!"

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Fair play to the Guardian for publishing that article on Mr Murdoch. Unlikely to be a popular viewpoint with its readership. I wonder if William Shawcross will now be subject to the same level of abuse that Louise Mensch was, or does that only happen to women?

[andrewducker]

I suspect he will.

I do find the people baying for News International to be banned from the media very troubling. I'm all for massive fines for illegal activity, but I'm also for free speech - and that means being in favour of people saying things I dislike.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, PE lessons put girls off me. Apparently I couldn't measure up to their gorgeously mustachioed gym teacher. Damn them!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it's a terrible way to treat people, and has entirely the wrong goals in mind.

[i_kender]

YAY new Culture novel! I LOVED the last one :)

[naath.livejournal.com]

I actually liked PE at school (I'm a girl); even though I was utterly dreadful at almost all the things we did and no better than mediocre at anything. There's clearly a huge variation in how well PE is taught (and how well teachers manage the bullying tendencies).

[naath.livejournal.com]

Abuse> I expect he'll get a lot of abuse; but mostly not of the same type.

[naath.livejournal.com]

MPs' pay...

I think MPs should be paid the national minimum wage and if they have a requirement for a second home it should be at the level the council would provide for a single person (their family, if they have one, should be living in the primary home). They should be able to expense only the cost of public transport between their homes (not private car use). (I know MPs also have office related expenses, which they still need to have paid).

This isn't because I think MPs are vastly overpaid fatcats; it's because these people set what the minimum wage is, they set what level of accommodation is deemed to be acceptable, they don't actually run the public transport network but they do dictate much of its funding. I want MPs to experience just how bad life on what they have determined is "enough" money, "enough" house space.

[andrewducker]

The issue there is that you're basically saying that you don't want any middle class people representing you.

People who are already on minimum wage can run without a loss, and incredibly rich people can run and just not care, but if you asked me to take that kind of level of pay cut in order to do the job of MP then I wouldn't be able to justify it. As it is, lawyers, doctors and other well paid professionals do take pay cuts (and I'm fine with that), but when you get to the point where you'd be asking almost anyone who has a degree and has had a job for a few years to drop the wages they're supporting their family on by a large amount, you're cutting out an awful lot of people who would be good MPs.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I think that's a risk I'm willing to take.

I'm sick of MPs making all these decisions about systems they don't ever have to rely on, with no compassion for the people who do.

Oh yes and- MPs should be absolutely banned from sending their children to private schools, or obtaining private medical care for themselves. Of course once they are earning 6quid/hour they won't be able to; but maybe we could start there.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

There seems to be a lot of variation. Some people get the random bullying which is sometimes stereoypical, which is horrible for just about everyone except some of those who are naturally talented.

I went to a fairly good school, and the PE had no bullying, and seemed fine for most people, but I wasn't very good, and didn't have the ambition to catch up, so I got high marks just for trying, but never really got into it, and didn't really get the idea that PE was a good thing to do, which seems to be the case for some people at most schools.

(And indeed, I think many people had a similar experience in academic subjects -- however hard people tried to teach well, if someone has fallen behind and doesn't understand the subject, they're going to fall into "just try to fake it for the exam" mode, and never really get it -- many people and many schools only ever really operate in that mode.)

So I don't know if it's truly MORE of a problem for some classes of people -- it seems likely, but not really demonstrated. But either way, it woudl be better if PE was in general fun and inclusive, even if you weren't very good.

[andrewducker]

Yup. This is a problem I constantly see with schooling - because it's aimed at constantly moving people forward, and making sure the best people are prepared for the next level, it leaves behind 90% of people, and they don't fulfil as much potential as they could do. It's a massive waste of what talent people do have.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I'd like to think teaching of PE has improved in recent years, I know there has been a big push towards improving teaching across the board in schools in the last decade or so.

I think my school was maybe just particularly bad for having a department of really awful PE teachers. I can remember one particularly glorious day in our 6th year when we were given the choice between doing PE or taking Bridge classes with the depute rector for the year.

And as a whole, the entire of 5th and 6th years stood up and went down to the end of the hall that was offering Bridge. Leaving the grand total of 3 pupils choosing to do PE. (Who were the kids that were really good at sports, who were the PE teachers chosen few.)

I don't think they ever let kids choose between PE and Bridge again after that, because it was such a humiliation for the PE department. But if ever there was a message that they were doing something wrong.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure that in Europe the ruling is that an IP address is personally identifiable information. A few years ago we were collecting a major database of internet traces for researchers and needed to know what level of anonymisation was suitable.

Now obviously if it was legal for me to publish a plain IP address and every IP address it connects to people would raise hell.

The main law we had to deal with was the one about the release of personally identifiable information. Hence we had to ensure that the IP addresses were suitably anonymised.

Without that legal protection (that the IP address counts as personally identifiable information) I'm not sure there would be much to stop an intermediate carrier (say your ISP) from publishing all the IP addresses you connect to. (They would not because it would be commercial suicide -- nonetheless it is good to have legal protection in place to stop this).

My point is that completely decoupling IP address from personal identity might have unexpected and bad consequences in european law.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

My biggest complaint was in the way the PE teachers cleared off from the changing rooms at the end of lessons, during the mandatory communal shower.

I'm not sure which bright spark thought it was a good idea for teenagers to have to take communal showers on their own, because it was really the place the very worst bullying I've ever seen took place.

And despite complaints from parents, the PE teachers refused to do anything about it. Character building they called it.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

What was the last one? I forget.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Ah, but if the communal showers are supervised then you get people complaining that the teacher is perving on them. This is probably what the bright spark was thinking (if they were thinking).

We didn't actually do communal showering except after swimming where we showered in our swimming kit; which I guess is a bit gross, but at least avoids the bullying.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

This is probably true. Though the teachers could have sat in the corner of the room without a view of the changing rooms, and maintained discipline.

The lazy fuckers all pissed off to their office to have coffee though.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I got a lot of praise at school for actually bothering to show up to PE, with all my kit, reading-willing-and-able to give it a go. Sure, I didn't get top-notch coaching at anything; but I was taught that giving it a go could be fun, and I wasn't taught that being useless at everything made me a useless person.

We didn't do very much team stuff, which helps - with more individual sports you can give more individual advice to people, allowing the best to get useful coaching whilst the worst can see they are achieving something.

[skington.livejournal.com]

The problem you'd have there is that you'd basically be saying "we don't want anyone with a University education (unless they're inherently rich enough not to care)" - which means that MPs will almost certainly not have the skills to wade through the (necessarily complicated) text of proposed laws and regulations. So civil servants and lobbyists end up running the show.

This is effectively the same argument against part-time legislatures: if it's not your full-time job to write laws, then other people will write laws for you.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Or invested enough in the process to put up with it.

Although mostly my hope is that this would raise the standard which we claim is the "lowest acceptable" standard of living.

[i_kender]

Surface Detail (2010) - the Culture goes to war.

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Surface-Detail-Iain-M-Banks/dp/1841498939)