Monday 30 March 2015

Trivia (should have been 27 December)

Iron Pony: 1905
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Iron Pony: 1905
New Zealand circa 1905
“E class locomotive, E 66, at the Petone Railway Workshops, with William Godber standing on the front. Known as ‘Pearson's Dream’, designed by G.A. Pearson, and built in 1905 for use on the Rimutaka Incline; written off in 1917”
Glass negative by A.P. Godber
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Humans have innate grasp of probability
via 3 Quarks Daily by Ewen Callaway in Nature

Study of indigenous Maya people finds probabilistic reasoning does not depend on formal education.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Can art still shock?
Shock is no longer chic. We’re right to be weary, but we’ve become too weary. Is offensive art still possible?… more

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30 Unforgettable Books Every Parent Should Read To Their Kids Before They Grow Up
via Lifehack by Carmen Sakurai
theveryhungrycaterpillar  wrinkle-in-time  Oh,_the_Places_You'll_Go
The comfort and nurturing one-on-one attention from parents while reading together encourages children to form a positive association with reading and books. Books have always played an important role in my son’s life, even before he was born. I read all sorts of marketing and self-improvement books, as well as fashion and computer magazines to the baby in my tummy, hoping it would help him (or her) grow familiar with my voice and the different sounds of the words being read.
Continue reading
It was so difficult to pick just one illustration that I've got three for you -- and the video from Burning Man of “Oh the Places You’ll Go” which is a real favourite of mine.

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Stop! Thief! Prevent Your Camera Being Stolen With Lenstag
via MakeUseOf by Harry Guinness
Earlier this year Lenstag reunited their first photographer with his stolen gear. When Philip Martin checked his recently purchased lens against Lenstag’s database he found it was stolen. He contacted Lenstag and returned it to the original photographer.
Continue reading

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Islamism and the left
Michael Walzer detects much anxiety on the left, where fear of being called Islamophobic seems greater than fear of Islamist zealotry… more

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Monuments and other media
an article by J.A. Tillmann published in Eurozine

Protest in Budapest against the whitewashing of Hungary's role in the Holocaust.
Szabadság tér / Liberty Square, 4 July 2014. Photo: Karli Iskakova. Source: Flickr
Recent controversy surrounding Budapest's proposed "Monument of Occupation" leads Hungarian philosopher J.A. Tillmann to reflect on perceptions of space and time in central Europe. And the sinister convergence in how public space and national media are currently managed in Hungary.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald, Literary Legend
via AbeBooks.co.uk
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, arguably one of the best writers of all time, lived a brief life and died without knowing his true fame. A member of the Lost Generation, a group of literary expats that included Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, Fitzgerald lived in Paris after World War I and made a living writing short stories for magazines. He didn’t know his novel The Great Gatsby would become a timeless classic read around the world.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
From poesy to carrot carnations
Poetry and the short story have slipped from minor arts to crafts, of interest primarily to other poets and short-story writers… more

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The otherworldly digital fantasy art of Guangjian Huang
via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
20141023211840
Stunning fantasy scenes by Guangjian Huang.
"I’m a concept artist. I work in a game company in China. My network name is G.J.”
[via crossconnectmag.com]
See more

‘I was bullied too’: stories of bullying and coping in an online community

an article by Katie Davis, David P. Randall, Anthony Ambrose and Mania Orand (Information School, University of Washington) published in Information, Communication & Society Volume 18 Issue 4 (2015)

Abstract

The American Academy of Pediatrics has identified bullying as a serious health risk for adolescents. In today’s age of social media and smartphones, this health risk has taken on new forms and extended its reach. Strategies to reduce the prevalence of and negative consequences associated with both traditional bullying and cyberbullying require knowledge of victims’ lived experiences as well as the coping strategies they employ – both effectively and ineffectively – to respond to their tormentors.

This article presents findings from an in-depth content analysis of the entire set of 1,094 comments from a viral blog post about cyberbullying in which people shared their personal stories of bullying and coping. These stories included a mix of both traditional and online forms of victimization, as well as more general reflections about the distinct qualities of networked publics that serve to magnify, spread, and exacerbate the effects of bullying.

The findings suggest that victims of both traditional bullying and cyberbullying are often targeted because they do not conform in one way or another to mainstream norms and values. Victims employed similar coping strategies to respond to their online and offline tormentors. Common behavioral strategies included seeking social support, ignoring/blocking, and finding a creative or expressive outlet.

The two most commonly cited cognitive strategies were self-talk and taking the bully's perspective. Not all strategies were judged to be effective. The findings have relevance to researchers seeking to understand bullying from the perspective of victims and to practitioners seeking to develop effective interventions to support bullying victims.

not many Taylor & Francis articles allow full access

View full text (HTML)
Download full text (PDF 21pp)


Why was there no religious war in premodern East Asia?

an article by David C. Kang (University of Southern California, USA) published in European Journal of International Relations Volume 20 Number 4 (December 2014)

Abstract

In premodern East Asia, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and China rarely experienced anything like the type of religious violence that existed for centuries in historical Europe, despite having vibrant religious traditions such as Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and numerous folk religions. How do we explain a region in which religion was generally not a part of the explanation for war and rebellion?

A unique data set of over 950 entries of Chinese and Korean violence over a 473-year span allows granular measurement of religious violence. I argue that the inclusivist religions of historical East Asia did not easily lend themselves to appropriation by political leaders as a means of differentiating groups or justifying violence. Addressing the paucity of religious war in historical East Asia is theoretically important because it challenges a large body of scholarly literature that finds a universal causal relationship between religion and war that is empirically derived mainly from the experience of only Christianity and Islam.

In contrast, it may be that certain types of religious traditions are less amenable to mass mobilization for violence. Moving beyond Christianity and Islam to include East Asian religious traditions promises both to address a potentially serious issue of selection bias and also to be a rich field for theorizing about the relationship between religion and war.


Sunday 29 March 2015

Trivia (should have been 21 December)

Swim Class: 1905
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Swim Class: 1905
Florida circa 1905
“Surf bathing at Palm Beach”
No ocean was ever a prettier shade of gray
8x10 glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
View original post

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Seaweed: In a World Hungry for Protein, It's the Kale of Meat
via Big Think by Orion Jones
Seaweed
Meat consumption is increasingly seen as a health risk, an environmental risk, and a misuse of precious land and water resources. Meat substitutes, however, have so far proven unsuccessful. Fake meat grown in a lab has proven costly and is widely mocked; eating bugs, which are rich in protein and nutrients, is simply unpalatable; substitutes such as (soy) beans still require much land and water for farming.
Enter seaweed...
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
On Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh, drama queen. Rejected in love, he threatened to burn his hand. When broke, he cajoled and guilt-tripped his brother for money… more

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The Ridiculously Long Flowchart To Help You Choose A Video Game
via MakeUseOf by Dave LeClair
Have you ever decided that you wanted to play a video game, but couldn’t decide which one to play? There’s a lot of fantastic games out there, whether you fancy getting your hands on a strategy game, or you want to play an MMO like World of Warcraft, it’s never easy to decide.
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Friday Fun: Little-Known Punctuation Marks
via Stephen’s Lighthouse by Stephen Abram

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
History of lying
Here’s the thing about lying: We all do it – three times in every 10 minutes of conversation – while finding it the most blameworthy of acts… more

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Pigs on Trial
via Boing Boing by Futility Closet
pig
For 500 years of European history, animals were given criminal trials: Bulls, horses, dogs, and sheep were arrested, jailed, given lawyers, tried, and punished at community expense. In the latest Futility Closet podcast we’ll explore this strange practice and try to understand its significance to the people of the time.
Continue reading

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The Shocking State Of Humanity: Our World With Just One Hundred People
via Lifehack
I’ve seen this inforgraphic before but it never fails to shock me.
View it here

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Houellebecq’s francophobic satire
Michel Houellebecq is not a polemicist but a satirist. And his target is not Islam but spineless French intellectuals… more

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High winds blow waterfall back up
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza

The River Kinder, in England's peak district, meets such high winds the flow is blasted back into the plateau. On better days, the Kinder Downfall drops 80 ft.
Continue reading/looking

Friday 27 March 2015

dead

Destitution in the UK: an interim report

a report by Suzanne Fitzpatrick et al for JRF

JRF’s Destitution in the UK programme focuses on the very bottom of the poverty spectrum – those in the most extreme hardship. Over the last few years there has been growing discussion in the media about destitution, with public figures citing the rising use of food-banks as evidence of an increase. However, there has been remarkably little attention paid to whether there is any solid evidence about the extent of destitution in the UK, what causes it or whether it has changed over recent years.

JRF’s Destitution in the UK programme aims to provide this evidence, and this interim report by a team at Heriot-Watt University is the starting point, reviewing the literature and agreeing a definition of destitution. The definition was developed with experts from across the UK and a survey of 2,000 members of the public:

“People are destitute if they lacked two or more of these six essentials over the past month, because they cannot afford them:
  • Shelter (have slept rough for one or more nights)
  • Food (have had fewer than two meals a day for two or more days)
  • Heating their home (have been unable to do this for five or more days)
  • Lighting their home (have been unable to do this for five or more days)
  • Clothing and footwear (appropriate for weather)
  • Basic toiletries (soap, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrush)
People are also destitute if their income is so low that they are unable to purchase these essentials for themselves.”

A large majority of the public agree that being in this situation constitutes destitution.

Click here for more on our Destitution in the UK programme.

Full report (PDF 73pp )


Between whisper and voice: Online women’s movement outreach in the UK and Germany

an article by Henrike Knappe (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen, Germany) and Sabine Lang (University of Washington, USA) published in European Journal of Women’s Studies Volume 21 Number 4 (November 2014)

Abstract

Women’s movements in Western Europe are not dead, but they have altered their strategies in ways that require adaptation of investigative repertoires.

Recent research highlights women’s movements’ pathways into institutions as well as the transnationalisation of activism.

This article focuses on the shifting public communication repertoire associated with these developments. Communication and movement outreach across Europe are increasingly constituted online. The authors investigate the degree to which women’s networks in Germany and the UK mobilise constituencies via online means.

Utilising network mapping tools as well as original data from women’s NGOs, they analyse the density and distribution of relationships in German and UK networks, as well as their interactive communication repertoires as indicators of their capacity to engage constituents.

The findings show that information-focused means of communication are more prevalent than interactive mobilisation tools. Women’s NGOs in the UK utilise more public engagement features than those in Germany. The authors relate these findings to second-, third- and fourth-wave feminisms, focusing on their distinct mobilisation strategies.


Tuesday 24 March 2015

Training in Mental Health Recovery and Social Justice in the Public Sector

Erika R. Carr, Rebecca Miller and Allison N. Ponce (Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA) and Ranjit Bhagwat (Samuel S. Stratton V.A. Medical Center, Albany, NY, USA) published in The Counseling Psychologist Volume 42 Number 8 (November 2014)

Abstract

Individuals who experience serious mental illness (SMI) frequently encounter stigma and disenfranchisement. Attention to this concern necessitates a social justice focus within the mental health field.

This article explores the significance and critical foundations of a psychology training experience grounded in a social justice and recovery-oriented perspective to answer the call for a focus on social justice and empowerment for individuals with SMI in mental health recovery.

A specific training program is highlighted as an example of how social justice and recovery-oriented psychology training can be conducted. It includes theoretical foundations, trainee and supervision factors, a training model, and a description of didactic, clinical, consultation, interdisciplinary, and recovery-initiative training experiences. Last, specific successes and challenges of this type of training experience, as well as recommendations for future program development, are shared.

Hazels comment
I wasn’t sure about the relevance of this article to this blog but thought “what the heck” and included it anyway.


Monday 23 March 2015

Town vs. gown? The impact of ‘studentification’ on university towns

an article by Melanie Nowicki, Intern - Families, Work and Welfare Policy at Citizens Advice

Here at Citizens Advice we spent some time last year thinking about the housing crisis and considering the debate. It was clear that there was a problem but the experiences of staff, volunteers and clients across the country didn’t always reflect the media coverage.

It seemed that the housing crisis felt very different in different places. We set about using our front-line experience to inform the national debate – by exploring problems through bureaux we could really understand the problems to ensure that we can help policy-makers and legislators find the right solutions.

Continue reading (lots of links to external articles and statistics)


Not all Labour Market Information is born equal

an article by Andy Durman (VP of UK operations for the labour market information firm Economic Modelling Specialists International) published in fenews.co.uk

The phrase Labour Market Information (LMI) is perhaps not the sort of phrase that is likely to get people excited. In fact, I can well imagine that in the ears of many it probably sounds rather dull. For me, however, I am hugely excited about the possibilities that LMI has to really make big changes to colleges, to local economies and above all to the lives of individual people.

Continue reading this interesting article


A social net? Internet and social media use during unemployment

an article by Miriam Feuls (Berlin University of the Arts, Germany), Christian Fieseler (BI Norwegian Business School, Norway) and Anne Suphan (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland) published in Work, Employment & Society Volume 28 Number 4 (August 2014)

Abstract

Many people who are unemployed tend to experience forms of psychological and social losses, including a weakened time structure, diminished social contacts, an absence of collective purpose, falling status, and inactivity.

This article focuses on the experience of diminished social contacts and addresses whether social media help the unemployed maintain their relationships.

Based on qualitative interviews with unemployed individuals, the article identifies various types of social support networks and their impact on individual experiences of inclusion and exclusion. Although the unemployed use social media to cultivate their social support networks, the opportunity to establish new contacts, both private and professional, is underutilized.

Thus, social network differentiation between the unemployed and employed persists online in social media.


Training for the unemployed: differential effects in white- and blue-collar workers with respect to mental well-being

an article by Antti Saloniemi, Katri Romppainen and Pekka Virtanen (University of Tampere, Finland) and Mattias Strandh (University of Umeå, Sweden) published in Work Employment & Society Volume 28 Number 4 (August 2014)

Abstract

In this study we investigate the effects of active labour market policy measures on health and well-being and how these effects are connected with socioeconomic status.

The data were collected among the participants (n = 212) in 24 conventional vocational training courses in Finland.

According to the results, training was accompanied by improvements in health and well-being among participants with a higher socioeconomic status, whereas for blue-collar workers the changes were neutral or even detrimental.

The results raise questions about the role of active labour market policy measures as a public service. There seems to be a risk that these types of measures maintain or even produce health differences between socioeconomic groups.


Friday 20 March 2015

Literacy, learning and identity: challenging the neo-liberal agenda through literacies, everyday practices and empowerment

an article by Vicky Duckworth (Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK) and Angela Brzeski (Runshaw College, Leyland, UK) published in Research in Post-Compulsory Education Volume 20 Issue 1 (March 2015)

Abstract

In the UK, further education (FE) colleges play a key role in providing literacy programmes.

This article draws upon our research in FE, with a focus on literacy, learning and identity, to explore how different learners are positioned differently depending on the value of the literacy practices they bring with them from home. Indeed, it is generally considered that recognising the literacies that learners bring into the classroom is an effective strategy to teaching and learning because purposeful and meaningful learning builds and expands on learners’ prior knowledge and experience to shape and construct new knowledge rather than seeing the learner as an empty vessel ready to be filled by the tutor.

Learning is seen as a social activity embedded in particular cultures and contexts where assessment is based on the learners demonstrating competence in achieving specific learning outcomes. The achievement of these learning outcomes is situated in the learners’ real life and everyday practices.

The paper concludes that New Literacy Studies and critical approaches to education are important to challenging prescriptive pre-set curriculum literacies driven by a neoliberalism agenda and to empowering learners in and out of the classroom.


Monday 16 March 2015

Trivia (should have been 13 December)

Ironmen: 1905
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Ironmen: 1905
Petone Railway Workshops circa 1905. H class steam locomotive, 0-4-2T type, for use on the Fell system on the Rimutaka Incline. NZR 199 built at Avonside Railway Workshops in 1875, went into service on the Rimutaka Incline in January 1877, written off and preserved in March 1956.
One of more than 2,000 train-related glass negatives, now in the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library, taken by New Zealand Railways employee and amateur photographer Albert Percy Godber (1875-1949).
View original post

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Unearthing the secrets of evolution through cave exploration
via Guardian Technology by Francesco Sauro
Cave exploration, or Speleology, is providing valuable insights into evolution. Italian explorer Francesco Sauro describes the importance of underground investigation.
Continue reading and do please open the links -- some fascinating pictures that I can't copy from the PDF of an article in an academic journal.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Definition of a dictionary
Do we any longer need a single, definitive authority on American English? The answer lies somewhere between Noah Webster and the Internet… more

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Plants can tell when they’re being eaten
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder

From the excellent Modern Farmer: an article about how new studies show that “plants can tell when they’re being eaten, and they don’t like it”.
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Reason and the Republic of Opinion
At this period ... of wreck and ruin, the one power that can save, can heal, can fortify, is clear and intelligent thought,” the editors of The New Republic wrote in 1915, in a promotional letter to its first subscribers “to state again the general purposes of the paper.”
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Rhetoric of cowardice
Cowardice and courage no longer carry the moral resonance they once did. They now tend to be used as goads to violence… more

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Neurology and psychiatry in Babylon
via OUP Blog by Edward Reynolds and James Kinnier Wilson
1260-babylon-cropped
How rapidly does medical knowledge advance? Very quickly if you read modern newspapers, but rather slowly if you study history. Nowhere is this more true than in the fields of neurology and psychiatry.
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Our Tools Have Changed Our Genes For Millions Of Years
via Big Think by Jag Bhalla
Bigthinktoolscaveman_carving_himself
Tools have changed our genes for millions of years. Paleo-people wouldn't have been possible without them: artificial aids preceded and enabled their bigger brains. And the slings and arrows of our evolutionary fortune weren’t entirely random. “Intelligently designed” factors have long influenced our evolution.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem
Long considered calisthenics for the brain, memorising poetry was once an educational mainstay. What did that mean for poetry?… more

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Inventions that didn’t change the world
via The National Archives
Portable cooking apparatus, 1845 (catalogue reference: BT 45/3/478)
Today sees [13 October saw] the official publication of Inventions that didn’t change the world, the latest book highlighting some of the fascinating records held at The National Archives.
Julie Halls explores domestic and professional designs registered in the 19th century for such delights as the anti-garotting cravat, a self-ventilating hat, the corset with an inflatable bust and artificial leeches.
Continue reading

Experience psychology – a proposed new subfield of service management

an article by Richard B. Chase and Sriram Dasu (University of Southern California, Los Angeles) published in Journal of Service Management Volume 25 Issue 2 (2015)

Abstract

Purpose
In their seminal book, The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore point out that customers buy experiences and are willing to pay a steep premium for them and hence service organizations should try to make them more fun. The purpose of this paper (and the premise of the recent book) is that services can be redesigned using psychological principles to deliver positive experiences for any kind of service, not just those that lend themselves to fun; by definition, satisfaction with a subconscious aspect of a service cannot be explained by the customer; and the psychological aspects of service interactions have to be approached with the same level of rigor as that are used to design processes that deliver the technical features of the service.

Design/methodology/approach
A point of view on the gap and opportunities in the field.

Findings
The authors show that there is an opportunity to extend the service operations field.

Practical implications
Enables managers and researchers to think about new approaches for designing experiences.

Social implications
Valuable in a number of areas including healthcare.

Originality/value
Presents a new point of view.

Hazel’s comment:
Careers advice is a service, the service needs to be managed, this article talks about experience psychology in terms of management of a service.
I think there is a good link.



Sunday 15 March 2015

Trivia (should have been 7 December)

Class A: 1909
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Class A: 1909
New Zealand circa 1909
“Class A locomotive, NZR No. 419, at the Petone Railway Workshops”
A.P. Godber Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library
View original post

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Why MDMA Makes You Feel Good (and Then Really Bad)
via Big Think by Robert Montenegro
Shutterstock_148300088
About a year ago, MDMA (a.k.a. Molly) was the flavour of the week among the “think of the children!” crowd after impure strains of the drug caused a string of hospitalisations and deaths across the eastern United States. In theory, Molly is supposed to be straight MDMA without any additives (unlike ecstasy, which is often laced with caffeine or some sort of amphetamine). In reality, sometimes naive users end up ingesting more chemicals than they bargained for.
Continue reading

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Inevitability of evolution
On the origins of evolutionary innovation. “Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest”… more

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40 Classic Books & Why You Should Read Them
via Abe Books by Richard Davies
Well, what makes a classic book? My eight-year-old asked this very question after spending several days with her nose buried in Charlotte’s Web. “Errr… I think it’s a very good book liked by lots people that stands the test of time,” I replied. “If people are still reading the book 50 years after it was published then it’s probably on its way to being a classic.”
Continue reading and discover whether you agree with Mr Davies! I do except for the Dickens, but then he does not include Jane Austen!

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Our Understanding of Giraffes Does Not Measure Up
by Natalie Angier in the New York Times via 3 Quarks Daily

For the tallest animals on earth, giraffes can be awfully easy to overlook. Their ochered flagstone fur and arboreal proportions blend in seamlessly with the acacia trees on which they tirelessly forage, and they’re as quiet as trees, too: no whinnies, growls, trumpets or howls. “Giraffes are basically mute,” said Kerryn Carter, a zoologist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “A snort is the only sound I’ve heard.”
Continue reading

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
War on clichés
The cliché hitman. Orin Hargraves stalks the inane, shopworn expressions that litter the English language… more

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30 Most Beautiful Bookshops Around The World
via lifehack
ElAteneoGrandSplendid
With the ease of acquiring e-books in one click, the brick and mortar bookstores seem to be sadly reducing in popularity. However, book lovers argue that a traditional temple of books can be an eclectic atmosphere that propels discovery, fantasy, entertainment, solitude and social networking. These spectacular bookstores encourage readers to put aside technology and enjoy the pleasures of the printed word on page.
Continue reading

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Train Your Brain to Be More Sympathetic
via Big Think by Orion Jones
Sympathy
By meditating on having compassion for someone in your life, a new study suggests that you can become a more sympathetic person in as little as two weeks. Conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, the study gave participants seven hours of practice during 30-minute sessions that spanned two weeks.
Continue reading

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Essays of Irving Howe
American Orwell. Irving Howe was a tender polemicist, a socialist with conservative cultural tastes and a deep commitment to heterodoxy… more

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How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math
via 3 Quarks Daily: Barbara Oakley in Nautilus
4385_65f148c815a4ebfaf8eb150460ba94fc
I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now – someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation. It’s hard to believe I’ve flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering.
Continue reading

Thursday 12 March 2015

No thought required: or at least not much. Ten items.

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Finding Time
via 3 Quarks Daily: Rebecca Solnit in Orion Magazine
09-07-Solnit 450
The four horsemen of my apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out.
These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our lives and expand our horizons. I’m listening to a man on the radio describe how great it is that there are websites where musicians who have never met or conversed or had any contact at all can lay down tracks together to make songs. While the experiment sounds interesting, the assumption sounds scary – that the complex personal, creative, and cultural collaborations of music-making could be unnecessary and you just need the digital conjunction of some skill sets. The speaker seems to believe that the sole goal is the production of songs, sundered from the production of social ties and social pleasure. But music has always been an occasion for people to get together – in rehearsals, nightclubs, parties, festivals, park band-shells, parades, and other social spaces. It is often the soundtrack to bodies in conjunction, whether marching or making love.
Continue reading

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A beautiful data-driven Tube ad from 1928
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
056c026d-1c66-4d42-9fae-a8e96df290c5-1020x827
This 1928 London Underground ad is a beautiful and witty example of using data to help people get the best use out of public services. By listing the tube's load at different times of the day, LU helped riders figure out how to avoid crushes, and by making the descriptions funny and insightful, the poster's creators created memorable hooks for putting the info in context.
Continue reading

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Lady Macbeth on Capitol Hill
via OUP Blog by Emma Smith
Describing her role as the ambitious political wife Claire Underwood in the American TV series House of Cards, Robin Wright recognized she is “Lady Macbeth to [Francis] Underwood’s Macbeth.” At one point in the second series, Claire emboldens her wavering husband: “Trying’s not enough, Francis. I’ve done what I had to do. Now you do what you have to do.”
It’s the equivalent, in the clipped dialogue of the genre, of Shakespeare’s most vehement and brutal image: Lady Macbeth offering to brain her suckling child “had I so sworn / As you have done to this” (1.7.55-9). The Underwoods rework Shakespeare’s ultimate power couple in a modern setting, but violent reactions in the American media to Claire’s characterization show that Lady Macbeth continues to challenge norms of femininity, 400 years after a young male actor first embodied her on the London stage. Those coordinates of sex, ambition, and evil plotted by Shakespeare still resonate. Lady Macbeth is a useful shorthand, as is seen in commentators on Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many other female public figures, to keep women in their place. “Here’s a question for you,” asked one recent tabloid headline, “what’s the difference between Lady Macbeth and Labour’s Yvette Cooper?” The article went on to suggest there was no difference at all; each would stop at nothing to get power for their husband.
No male politician, however ruthlessly ambitious, is ever called a Macbeth.
Continue reading

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Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World,’ by Tim Whitmarsh
via 3 Quarks Daily: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in The New York Times Sunday Book Review

The philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, beloved by generations of Columbia University students (including me), was known for lines of wit that yielded nuggets of insight. He kept up his instructive shtick until the end, remarking to a colleague shortly before he died: “Why is God making me suffer so much? Just because I don’t believe in him?” For Morgenbesser, nothing worth pondering, including disbelief, could be entirely de-­paradoxed.
Continue reading

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A history of swords and their sharp, pointy, or bludgeoning cousins
via Boing Boing by Wink

The history of weapons is a fascinating subject, but none more so than the history of swords and their sharp, pointy or bludgeoning cousins. And this book covers most, if not all of it. Starting from the beginning of primitive stone-age weapons, the book spans over 4000 years of history and covers seven different sections: Classical Weapons, Medieval Weapons, Renaissance Weapons, Age of Sabres, Islamic Weapons, Weapons of the Far East and a Wider World of Weapons. What really makes this book pop is how seamlessly it integrates the use and history of weapons with culture. Many weapons carried far more significance as a symbol than as a fighting tool and the book gives some perspective on the different roles these weapons played. The images were taken at the Berman Museum of World History from their 6000-piece collection, and it shows. There are hundreds of images of beautiful swords, each described in detail from its use to its creator.
Continue reading

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Database of Spaghetti Westerns
via Research Buzz Firehose
New-to-me: there’s a database of spaghetti westerns! I had no idea. And the oldest movie in the database was made in 1906, so this particular movie subset goes back a lot further than I thought…
Hazel’s comment: This I have bookmarked. Best escapism ever.

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The curious case of culprit
via OUP Blog by John Kelly
Amnesia, disguises, and mistaken identities? No, these are not the plot twists of a blockbuster thriller or bestselling page-turner. They are the story of the word culprit.
At first glance, the origin of culprit looks simple enough. Mea culpa, culpable, exculpate, and the more obscure inculpate: these words come from the Latin culpa, “fault” or “blame.” One would suspect that culprit is the same, yet we should never be so presumptuous when it comes to English etymology. Culprit is indeed connected to Latin’s culpa, but it just can’t quite keep its story straight.
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The Butterfly, the Ant and the Oregano
via 3 Quarks Daily: Nicholas Wade in The New York Times
It may be hard to imagine a ménage à trois, satisfactory to all parties, in which one member tries to dislodge another with a toxic gas and a third eats the offspring of the other two. But such an arrangement exists, and one of its members may even be sitting quietly in your kitchen’s spice rack. The story begins with the Large Blue, a butterfly that lays its eggs on the wild oregano plant. The caterpillar munches on the plant’s flower buds for two weeks and then one night drops to the ground. Most ants forage at noon, but by timing its descent at dusk, the infant caterpillar gets adopted by a red ant known as Myrmica that forages only at day’s end. The caterpillar deceives an ant into thinking it is a stray grub from the ant’s own nest. It does so by adopting the grub’s posture and by exuding a scent that mimics that of the ant’s own species. Taken underground to the Myrmica nest, the adopted caterpillar doesn’t remain a helpless foundling for long. It starts to acquire influence in the ant society by imitating the little clucking sounds made by the ants’ queen. And having gained high status in the nest, it can fulfill the purpose of its visit: to feast on the ants’ larvae. The ants themselves use their larvae as a food source when times are tough, so for their queenly guest to behave like a cannibal may not strike them as all that abhorrent.
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Do click through if only to see the illustration which will not paste into here!

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The young Chekhov: a comedian in spite of himself
via Arts & Letters Daily: Chris Power in New Statesman
The Prank: the Best of Young Chekhov reveals how Anton Chekhov developed from jobbing hack to master of the short story.
There are, at the very least, three Anton Chekhovs: the doctor, the playwright and the short-story writer. In each field, great achievements sprang from undistinguished beginnings. Chekhov was an average medical student, yet he had numerous triumphs as a doctor, including manning the village clinic when a cholera epidemic struck the area around his estate and his 1890 journey to investigate the prison island of Sakhalin: an ambitious humanitarian mission to make the realities of Siberia manifest to the Russian people. As a playwright, he faltered initially, failing to find anyone willing to produce the turgid melodrama PlatonovIvanov proved his dramatic talent but The Wood Demon, staged two years later, was savaged and half a decade elapsed before he wrote another play. His final four, however, persist as centrepieces of world theatre.
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A victorious army in the making: Raising King Henry V's army of 1415
via The National Archives by Benjamin Trowbridge
It is 600 [and one] years since King Henry V’s army assembled on the southern coast of England to set sail for the French coast in pursuit of their sovereign’s claim to the French crown. The military expedition to France in 1415 opened a new phase in Anglo-French hostilities that had persisted sporadically for nearly a century; a symptom of a rivalry between the two kingdoms that was much older.
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Sex, hygiene, and style in 1840s Paris
via OUP Blog by René Weis
The young woman who inspired Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias and Verdi’s Violetta in La traviata conceived at least once in the course of her 23 years. At the time she was in her late teens. During the five years that followed the birth of her baby, between the ages of 17 and 22, she prospered as the leading courtesan of the most glamorous city in Europe. The word ‘courtesan’ is a euphemism for an upper class prostitute, a paid woman who doubled as a trophy exhibit at the theatre and opera. The world of chic Parisian sexuality in the 1840s was simultaneously covert and ostentatious: the more brilliant the appearance of the courtesan, the grander the reputation for wealth and generosity of the buck or ‘lion’ who owned her just then. Only rich and famous men could afford women like Marie Duplessis whose wardrobe and apartment, paid for by the men who kept her, added up to a fortune.
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Wednesday 11 March 2015

Ten "trivial" items for Saturday reading

Why John le Carré is more than a spy novelist
via 3 Quarks Daily: William Boyd at The New Statesman
It must be difficult to write the life of a man who is still very much with us, and in the public eye, no matter how much liberty the biographer has been given to tell the story, warts and all. Sisman – a very fine and astute biographer – has done an excellent, not to say exemplary, job under the circumstances. Only rarely is one aware of a veil of discretion being drawn, of names not being named, yet it is impossible to imagine this Life being bettered – though le Carré’s own memoir, to be published in 2016, may add some gloss.
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Arabia: ancient history for troubled times
via OUP Blog by Greg Fisher
In antiquity, ‘Arabia’ covered a vast area, running from Yemen and Oman to the deserts of Syria and Iraq. Today, much of this region is gripped in political and religious turmoil that shows no signs of abating. In addition to executions, murder, and a bloody war against the security forces and other armed groups, the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) is also waging a relentless assault on the culture and heritage of Syria and Iraq. This represents a savage attempt to impose its own narrow view of history on the region, as well as to plunder artifacts for sale on the black market. But while contraband dollars support its operations, it is also the suppression of diversity that drives ISIS; the group is particularly devoted to the eradication of any inconvenient reminder of the pre-Islamic past, where communities of Jews and Christians flourished and pagan deities were worshipped. The conquering Muslim armies of the seventh and eighth centuries may have swept past the now-endangered archaeological sites of Syria and Iraq, but the Islamic State sees the destruction of such places as key to its core mission. This line of thinking explains their destruction of the Temple of Bel at Palmyra, parts of Hatra in Iraq, and countless other structures and sites. Elsewhere, the war in Yemen is causing a great amount of damage to the country. Even without war, Middle Eastern heritage finds itself in danger; in Saudi Arabia, for example, building work has claimed parts of ancient Mecca, erasing alternative narratives of the past.
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National Registration – what happened next?
via National Archives by Audrey Collins
On the night of 29 September 1939 details of civilians in England and Wales were entered on forms delivered to them earlier in the week.
The completed forms were ready and waiting for an enumerator to call back over the weekend and issue identity cards for everyone in the household. This was what actually happened in most cases, but there were some exceptions – there always are.
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Cockney rhyming slang “dying out”
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
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The “old, confusing tradition” is on its way to the history books, should the newspapers be believed.
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Military radiology and the Boer War
via OUP Blog by Arpan K. Banerjee
The centenary of the Great War has led to a renewed interest in military matters, and throughout history, war has often been the setting for medical innovation with major advances in the treatment of burns, trauma, and sepsis emanating from medical experience in the battlefield.
X-rays, discovered in 1895 by Roentgen, soon found a role in military conflict. The first use of X-rays in a military setting was during the Italo-Abyssinian war in 1896. The Italians lost the battle at Adoa and casualties were taken to the military hospital in Naples where X-rays were performed under the leadership of Colonel Alvaro.
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Upon This Rock: What the stone edicts of Ashoka tell us about India’s great Buddhist ruler
via 3 Quarks Daily: Nayanjot Lahiri in Caravan

Bilingual inscription (Greek and Aramaic) by king Ashoka, from Kandahar. Kabul Museum.
Thanks to Wikipedia

There is nothing especially striking about the cluster of rocks which crowns the edge of a low hilly ridge near the village of Erragudi in the Andhra region. From a distance, the cluster appears unremarkable, while the ridge on which it sits is somewhat bare, rising out of a patchwork of cultivated fields and sparsely dotted with vegetation. The rocks on it stand a mere 30 metres or so above the plains.
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A fascinating story

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A baptism of fire, steel and stone: Henry V's army and the siege of Harfleur
via National Archives by Benjamin Trowbridge
French fishermen casting their nets in the open sea off the Normandy coast on 13 August 1415 would have witnessed a horrifying sight: There was a vast array of ships sailing south across the English Channel for the French coast. The anticipated English military invasion had finally come.
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Istanbul, not Constantinople
via OUP Blog
Throughout history, many cities changed their names. Some did it for political reasons; others hoped to gain an economic advantage from it. Looking at a modern map of the world, you’d probably have a hard time finding Edo, Istropolis, or Gia Dinh. That is because these places are today known as Tokyo, Bratislava, and Ho Chi Minh City respectively. With this interactive map, you can explore a few notable examples of city name changes, and the history behind them.
Fascinating

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The secret diary of Stalin’s man in Churchill’s London
On Chamberlain as the ‘accountant of politics,’ Joe Kennedy’s ‘gloomy view’ of British prospects
via Arts & Letters Daily: Gabriel Gorodetsky in the Boston GlobeWinston Churchill and Ivan Maisky dined in the observatory of the Russian Embassy in London in August 1941.
Stalin’s bloody terror of the 1930s discouraged any Soviet official from putting pen to paper, let alone keeping a personal diary. The only significant exception is the fascinating, rich journal kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943.
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The Magical Dimensions of the Globe
via 3 Quarks Daily by Charlie Huenemann
There’s a particularly good episode of Doctor Who (“The Shakespeare Code”) wherein the Doctor and Martha visit Shakespeare and save the world from a conspiracy of witches. The witches’ plan is to take possession of Shakespeare and force him to write magical incantations into the (now lost) play Love’s Labours Won. (It’s not really magic, of course, but some quantum dynamical dimension of psychic energy… well, whatever.) When the play is then performed in the Globe Theater and the psychic words are spoken, a transgalactic portal will open up, through which an entire population of witches - really, in fact, members of an alien species known as the Carrionites - will march through and take over the world. Luckily, the Doctor is wise to the plans, and he and Martha improvise a counter-spell on the spot and disaster is thereby averted.
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Tuesday 10 March 2015

Trivia (should have been 6 December)

Small Businessman: 1924
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Small Businessman: 1924
“Probably the smallest plane in the world. Built by Edmund Allen of Wash­ington, D.C., who was formerly test pilot for Army Air Service during the world war. Plane is equipped with 9-horsepower motorcycle engine and weighs only 205 pounds with wingspread of 27 feet. Mr. Allen, in cockpit, flies it often and recently attained height of 1800 feet capable of making 63 mph.”
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Linguistic necromancy: a guide for the uninitiated
via OUP Blog by George Walkden
It’s fairly common knowledge that languages, like people, have families. English, for instance, is a member of the Germanic family, with sister languages including Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages. Germanic, in turn, is a branch of a larger family, Indo-European, whose other members include the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, and more), Russian, Greek, and Persian.
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Fascinating if you like order and clarity.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Virtues of know-nothing criticism
Does great expertise make for great criticism? Not always. Knowing everything about a topic forecloses on original and unexpected takes… more

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Shakespeare and Company
via An Awfully BIG Blog Adventure by Lucy Coats

There have been many bookshops marking all the pages of my life from childhood onwards. There was Mr Oxley’s in Alresford, there was the first ever Hammicks, there were all the bookshops of Hay, there was James Thin in Edinburgh, the Libreria Aqua in Venice – each has a special place in my heart. But the one I love most is in Paris.
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Coffee and Your Health: A Complex Genetic Web
via Big Think by Orion Jones
Coffee_vintage
New research suggests that drinking coffee has more to do with your genes than previously thought. Geneticists at the Harvard School of Public Health recently discovered six new genetic variants that predispose certain individuals toward caffeine consumption. It may help explain why some people differ in their reactions to caffeine: while half a cup of coffee makes some jittery, others can drink caffeine all day with little or no change in behaviour.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Beethoven’s personal life
Lionized in his own time, Beethoven was nonetheless in a perpetual rage. Thus his fondness for exclamation points… more

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Timeless Soul
via Prospero by K.Y.W.
NOSTALGIA, the latest album from Annie Lennox, the British singer-songwriter, recalls an era of smoky clubs and street-corner swing. Many of the tracks, including Hoagy Carmichael’s “Memphis in June” and “Georgia on My Mind,” George Gershwin’s “Summertime” and Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit”, are from the classic American songbook.
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The lost cyber-crayolas of the mid-1990s
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Circuit board green, cyber space orange, floppy yellow, graphic green, green.com, infra red, megabyte blue, megahertz maroon, on-line orange, plug & play pink, point & click green, transistor yellow, ultra violet, web surfin' blue, world wide web yellow, www.purple.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Essays of Irving Howe
American Orwell. Irving Howe was a tender polemicist, a socialist with conservative cultural tastes and a deep commitment to heterodoxy… more

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Study: Being Bored Can Be as Stressful as Being Overworked
via Big Think by Robert Montenegro
Shutterstock_171929309
No doubt we've all felt the frustrating exhaustion that comes with being overworked. Sleep gets sacrificed. Patience wears thing. Endless tasks surround you like quicksand. In short: stress gets to the best of us when we've reached our duty capacity.
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Monday 9 March 2015

The politics of quangocide

an article by Katharine and Matthew Flinders (University of Sheffield) published in Policy & Politics Volume 43 Number 1 (January 2015)

Abstract

This article returns to Christopher Hood’s influential work, The politics of quangocide, to examine the United Kingdom’s coalition government's approach to public bodies reform since May 2010. It combines theoretical-innovation and fresh empirical research to argue that the coalition has not simply engaged in quangocide, but has adopted a dual-track strategy based upon 'bureau-shuffling' and a focus on strengthening internal control rather than outright abolition.

This has significant international and comparative relevance due to the manner in which these findings resonate with broader 'post New Public Management' narratives of state restructuring.


Friday 6 March 2015

The role of the public sector in combating inequality

an article by Christoph Hermann (FORBA – The Working Life Research Centre, Vienna and ILO) published in International Journal of Labour Research Volume 6 Issue 1 (2014)

Abstract

In the last decades, the merits of the public sector, including public infrastructures and services, have mostly been discussed with respect to their efficiency. Little attention has been paid to the redistributive effects of public services – despite the fact that equal access to essential services such as health care, education, transport and energy benefits low-income earners more than high-income earners and contributes to social equality.

This has several dimensions:
first, the (cash) value of public services as a proportion of income is greater for low-income households; for example, low-income earners use public transport more frequently.
Second, the public sector provides comparably decent jobs for low-skilled and marginalized workers, and wage inequality tends to be lower than in the private sector.
Third, the public sector guarantees of equal treatment of all citizens by providing the same service for everyone.

However, privatization, marketization and, more recently, the public sector cuts imposed in response to the financial crisis have undermined the redistributive effect of public services.

Full text (PDF 16pp)


Self-control trumps work motivation in predicting job search behavior

an article by Pieter E. Baay, Denise T.D. de Ridder, Tanja van der Lippe and Marcel A.G. van Aken (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) and Jacquelynne S. Eccles (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) published in Journal of Vocational Behavior Volume 85 Issue 3 (December 2014)

Abstract

Current labour market entrants face an increasingly challenging job search process. Effective guidance of job seekers requires identification of relevant job search skills.

Self-control (i.e., the ability to control one’s thoughts, actions, and response tendencies in view of a long-term goal, such as finding employment) is assumed to be one such relevant job search skill. The current study is the first to empirically assess the importance of self-control in the job search process. This is compared to the role of motivation, which is generally considered a crucial predictor of job searching.

Based on a sample of 403 Dutch prospective vocational training graduates, we found that higher levels of self-control were related to higher levels of preparatory job search behaviour and job search intentions half a year later, shortly before labour market entrance. Self-control was a significantly stronger predictor of job searching than work motivation.

Moreover, relations between self-control and job searching were largely independent of motivation, which may suggest that job-seekers benefit from self-control through adaptive habits and routines that are unaffected by motivation.

We propose that job search interventions, which traditionally focus on strengthening motivation, may benefit from a stronger focus on improving self-control skills.