The super-centralisation of the English state – Why we need to move beyond the devolution deception

an article by Robin Hambleton (University of the West of England, UK) published in Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit Volume 32 Issue 1 (2017)

Abstract

In a stream of high-profile announcements, the UK central government has said that it wants to devolve power to sub-regions within England – to city regions and across the country.

This article presents evidence to show that the actual intent of government policy is the reverse. Instead of promoting the creation of powerful, independent sub-regional authorities, answerable to the citizens who elected them, the government is seeking to impose a super-centralised model of decision-making in which locally elected politicians are required to comply with central directives.

By drawing on work with city region leaders in England, the article develops criteria for assessing sub-regional governance. Inspirational examples of city region governance in other countries are presented.

These examples show that the current super-centralisation of the English state is out of step with progressive policy making in other countries.

Suggestions on how to develop real devolution in England are outlined.

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A ‘great way to get on’? The early career destinations of science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates

an article by Emma Smith and Patrick White (University of Leicester, UK) published in Research Papers in Education Volume 32 Issue 2 (2017)

Abstract

Concerns about a shortage of highly skilled workers in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) sector have been expressed frequently since the late 1940s. Although these claims have been challenged as being insufficiently grounded in evidence, they have formed the basis of policies directing considerable resources to STEM education, particularly in the university sector.

This paper uses data from the Higher Education Statistical Agency from 1994 to 2010, covering more than three million UK graduates, to contribute to the existing research into the purported skills gap in the STEM sector. It examines their destinations six months after graduation to establish the proportion of graduates from different subject areas that enter graduate careers, with a particular focus on STEM graduates and highly skilled STEM occupations.

The findings show that only a minority of graduates enter ‘graduate’ positions within six months of finishing their degree and many find themselves unemployed or underemployed. Overall, STEM graduates fare little better than non-STEM graduates and while graduates in some STEM subjects fare slightly better than average, those with other STEM degrees fare worse than those with non-STEM degrees.

The findings appear incompatible with a true shortage of potential STEM workers and raise questions about employers’ expectations and the continued subsidisation of STEM degrees.

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What is an online community? A new definition based around commitment, connection, reciprocity, interaction, agency, and consequences

an article by Michael Hammond (University of Warwick, Coventry, UK) published in International Journal of Web Based Communities Volume 13 Number 1 (2017)

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of online community. It is divided into three main sections.

The first examines the challenge of defining the concepts of community and being online.

The second looks at definitions of online community as well as the ways in which the term has been used across a wide range of contexts, covering issues of attachment, emotion, community strength, motivation for participation, and relationship to technology.

The third provides a general definition of online community around six key elements: commitment; connection to others; reciprocity; interaction; agency and consequences.

The paper sensitises practitioners and researchers to the contested nature of community and provides a definition that is both broad and complex.

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Brighten up your Thursday with ten interesting items

Rethinking human-elephant relations in South Asia
via OUP Blog by Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Throughout history and across cultures elephants have amazed and perplexed us, acquiring a plethora of meanings and purposes as our interactions have developed. They have been feared and hunted as wild animals, attacked and killed as dangerous pests, while also laboring for humans as vehicles, engineering devices, and weapons of war. Elephants have also been exploited for the luxury commodity of ivory, laughed at as objects of entertainment, and venerated as subjects of myth and symbolism. Throughout history humans have forged deeply effective connections with elephants, both as intimate companions and as spectacles of wonder.
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So Few Lives Divide Us
via An Awfully Big Blog Adventure by Catherine Butler
Here’s a harebrained theory for you. It applies only to the southern half of the country (the North needs a theory of its own), so please draw a line across your imaginary map of Britain, running from the Mersey to the Humber.
The truncated realm before you is a fantasy landscape. Oxford is its symbolic centre, and marks the place where two great tectonic plates meet and clash. (This seismic activity explains why, from Lewis Carroll, through Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman and Frances Hardinge, Oxford has produced so much seminal fantasy.)
Beyond, the country is divided on East-West lines. To the West, fantasy is about myth and the land. Its locus is the standing stone, the ancient well, the cave; its magic is nature magic; its past is the deep past. This is the fantasy I've always felt closest to, and most wished to write.
But I also love the fantasy of the East. Here is the fantasy of time slips and family ghosts. Its locus is the grand house; its magic is memory and dream magic; its past is the historical past. If the West has Alan Garner, Catherine Fisher, Jenny Nimmo and Susan Cooper (albeit she has a foot in both camps, geographically), the East has Lucy M. Boston, Philippa Pearce, Joan G. Robinson, and Rudyard Kipling (although he, too, is an ambiguous case).
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Lost space probe finally found on comet
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

In 2014, the Philae space probe left the Rosetta spacecraft and descended to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Unfortunately, Philae missed its landing due to an anchor mishap, bounced around, and then vanished. On Sunday, just a few weeks before Rosetta's expected crash into the comet and the end of the mission, Cecilia Tubiana of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research was scouring new images of the comet transmitted from Rosetta and noticed the dishwasher-sized probe in a crack.
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Relic of a long-gone medieval community
via the Guardian by Derek Niemann

Early Tudor stained glass in Madingley church, showing, left, a figure representing charity and justice, and, right, Charlemagne.
Photograph: Sarah Niemann
A time-travelling Tudor peasant might return to the place of their birth and find reassurance in the sight of Madingley’s medieval church. They could stand before its sturdy tower and run their fingers over stones embedded in mortar, as I did, then step inside to rediscover the font where they were baptised, and look up for re-acquaintance with exquisitely detailed medieval figures floating in stained glass.
But a hard stare into the nettled field beside the churchyard would make them wonder where their village had gone. The 18th century owners of Madingley Hall, which is about four miles from the centre of Cambridge, desired an estate with a view, and that view did not include a village street. So by the middle of the century the people had been evicted from their homes, their houses razed to the ground. I came to search for evidence of this lost community and found it.
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22-year-old Elizabeth Taylor on What's My Line
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Great episode of What's my Line from 1964 in which Elizabeth Taylor uses a squeaky voice in an attempt to trick the blindfolded panelists.

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What Happens in the Brain When We Misremember
via 3 Quarks Daily: Simon Makin in Scientific American

For illustration purposes only. Credit: PETER DAZELEY Getty Images
Most people think of memory as a faithful, if incomplete, recording of the past – a kind of multimedia storehouse of experiences. But psychologists, neuroscientists and lawyers know better. Eyewitness testimony, for instance, is now known to be notoriously unreliable. This is because memory is not just about retrieving stored information. Our minds normally construct memories using a blend of remembered experiences and knowledge about the world. Our memories can be frazzled, though, by new experiences that end up tangling the past and the present.
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Geographically representative map of the London Underground
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

The Transport for London tube map, building on Harry Beck's pioneering work in 1931, is rightly hailed as a masterpiece of simplification and clarity in data visualisation.
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In the Attic of Early Islam
via Arts & Letters Daily: Robert F. Worth in The New York Review of Books

Musée du Louvre, Paris/RMN-Grand Palais/Art ResourceInlaid metal basin depicting scenes from the Mamluk court, later known as the Baptismal Bowl of Saint Louis, by Muhammad Ibn al-Zayn, Egypt, circa 1320-1340
Sometime around the year 1314, a retired Egyptian bureaucrat named Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri began writing a compendium of all knowledge, under the appealingly reckless title The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition. It would eventually total more than 9,000 pages in thirty volumes, covering all of human history from Adam onward, all known plants and animals, geography, law, the arts of government and war, poetry, recipes, jokes, and of course, the revelations of Islam.
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11 facts you may not have known about Roman gladiators
via OUP Blog Zackery Cuevas and Cassandra Gill
About two thousand years ago, fifty thousand people filled the Colosseum in Rome to participate in one of the most fascinating and violent events to ever take place in the ancient world. Gladiator fights were the phenomenon of their day – a celebration of courage, endurance, bravery, and violence against a backdrop of fame, fortune, and social scrutiny. Today, over 6 million people flock every year to admire the Colosseum, but what took place within those ancient walls has long been a matter of both scholarly debate and general interest.
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The Inquisition followed sound science
via Arts & Letters Daily: Jacob Haqq-Misra in The Boston Globe
When Pope John Paul II announced in 1992 that Galileo was correct, more than 350 years after his condemnation by the Inquisition, the world reacted with apathy, relief, and amusement. No one doubts any more that Earth revolves around the sun, and even private Catholic schools had been teaching heliocentricity to their students prior to the official apology.
Our historical understanding of the Galileo affair tends to implicate the church as clinging unnecessarily to a literal interpretation of the Bible, which required the faithful to accept the untenable theory of geocentrism. From elementary school onward, we’re taught that the church stood firmly athwart scientific progress, bellowing “Stop!” Indeed, the clash has gone down through the ages as a sort of morality play of science versus religion, pitting the proponents of progress against religious reactionaries. But what if that morality play itself is nothing more than dogma?
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Why Do Some People Become Addicted to Digital Games More Easily? A Study of Digital Game Addiction from a Psychosocial Health Perspective

an article by Eui Jun Jeong (Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea), Dan J. Kim (University of North Texas, Denton, USA) and Dong Min Lee (Namseoul University, Seoul, South Korea) published in International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction Volume 33 Issue 3 (2017)

Abstract

Exploring digital game addiction from a psychosocial perspective has gained much attention because digital game addiction is a serious social computing issue related to public health. A number of studies have empirically tested the effects of depression and loneliness on aggression, but few studies have explored the relationships among the psychosocial constructs (i.e., depression, loneliness, and aggression) and their effects on game addiction.

In addition, the mediating role of aggression in digital game addiction has neither been proposed nor empirically tested. Moreover, although the psychological constructs related to game addiction have been proposed as multidimensional concepts and digital game addiction itself has been suggested as a multidimensional construct, few studies have been proposed and conducted using multidimensional constructs.

This study sought to fill these gaps by proposing an integrated model of digital game addiction from a psychosocial health perspective.

In particular, this study had three objectives:

1. to propose a second-order game addiction model addressing the relationships among loneliness, depression, aggression, and game addiction as multidimensional constructs and presenting aggression as a mediator between other psychosocial constructs and game addiction;
2. to empirically validate the proposed model using survey data obtained from actual online game users; and
3. to provide new insights for game policymakers in dealing with the digital game addiction issues.

Based on the empirical findings, the theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed herein.

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Oblivion of online reputation: how time cues improve online recruitment

an article by Alexander Novotny and Sarah Spiekermann (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria) published in International Journal of Electronic Business Volume 13 Number 2/3 (2017)

Abstract

In online crowdsourcing labour markets, employers decide which job-seekers to hire based on their reputation profiles. If reputation systems neglect the aspect of time when displaying reputation profiles, though, employers risk taking false decisions, deeming an obsolete reputation to be still relevant.

As a consequence, job-seekers might be unwarrantedly deprived of getting hired for new jobs and can be harmed in their professional careers in the long-run. This paper argues that exposing employers to the temporal context of job-seekers' reputation leads to better hiring decisions. The visible temporal context in reputation systems helps employers to ignore a job-seeker's obsolete reputation.

An experimental lab study with 335 students shows that current reputation systems fall short of making them aware of obsolete reputation. In contrast, graphical time cues improve the social efficiency of hiring decisions.

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Adolescents’ Perspectives of Youth Non-Suicidal Self-Injury Prevention

an article by Emily Berger (Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia), Penelope Hasking (Monash University and Curtin University, Bentley, Western Australia) and Graham Martin (The University of Queensland, Herston, Australia) published in Youth & Society Volume 49 Issue 1 (January 2017)

Abstract

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is of increasing concern, yet many adolescents who self-injure are reluctant to seek professional help. Instead, they turn to friends for support, although it is unclear what these friends can offer.

This study aimed to identify adolescents’ views of how peers and online friends can help young people who self-injure, and examine differences according to age, gender, and exposure to NSSI. Students (n = 2,637; aged 12-18 years) from 41 schools completed questions asking them to describe what peers and online friends could do to help young people who self-injure.

Thematic analysis identified seven strategies, including communication about NSSI with peers and online friends, referral to adults and health professionals, greater public awareness of NSSI, and reduced peer stigma and bullying. Endorsement of themes varied by age, gender, and experience with NSSI.

Findings have implications for school prevention of NSSI.

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The limits of London

an article by Jonathan D. Paul (University College London, UK) published in International Journal of Urban Sciences Volume 21 Issue 1 (2017)

Abstract

The metropolis of London, UK, can be defined in multiple ways.

The official statistical definition of Greater London is somewhat arbitrary and differs substantially from postal, telephone, political, transport, and many other Londons.

This paper critically compares new methods of defining the limits of London, using census data and railway travel-times, and within the context of political leanings and historical development.

London can be divided into an inner core and outer fringe, the latter often indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. However, there are striking differences within this fringe: while the edge of the city is sometimes sharp, it more often takes the form of a zone up to 10 km wide. This width reflects the wealth of ways in which the city can be defined.

The concept of London’s economic footprint or travel-to-work area has motivated the inclusion a new super-Greater London unit, well beyond traditional city limits. Commuter towns within this area can be considered ‘half-London’. While viewing London’s limits dynamically in relation to its surrounding hinterland is certainly attractive and satisfies multiple datasets, cleaving to the official definition of Greater London is more useful for statistical purposes.

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Unpacking the determinants of life satisfaction: a survey experiment

an article by Viola Angelini (University of Groningen and Netspar, Tilburg, The Netherlands) Marco Bertoni (University of Padova, Italy) and Luca Corazzini (University of Messina and Bocconi University, Milan, Italy) published in Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society Volume 180 Issue 1 (January 2017)

Summary

We present results of a survey experiment aimed at assessing context effects on reporting life satisfaction, exerted by raising awareness of fundamental life domains before eliciting overall life satisfaction, through questionnaire manipulations.

Psychologists refer to similar context effects, generated by providing more details about the object of a subsequent evaluation, as ‘unpacking effects’.

The longitudinal structure of our experimental design allows us to assess the effects of the questionnaire manipulation both between and within subject. In our sample of university students, asking subjects to report satisfaction with life domains before reporting overall satisfaction with life generates a robust unpacking effect, as it shifts upwards the subsequent mean overall life satisfaction evaluations.

In addition, raising awareness about life domains significantly increases reliability and validity of self-reported life satisfaction, by reducing the dispersion of responses and increasing the association between life satisfaction and life domain evaluations.

We also detect heterogeneous effects across subgroups of our sample – such as people with children or in bad health – and discuss implications of these findings for research on life satisfaction.

Full text (PDF)

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‘We're Sorry to Hear You've Been Unwell…’ Personal Reflections on Health and Well-being in the Workplace

an essay by Andrea Prothero (University College Dublin) published in Journal of Management Studies Volume 54 Issue 1 (January 2017)

Opening Paragraphs

Open Heart Surgery

At 6pm on 16 December 2014 while sat at my kitchen table and slowly marking 500+ exams I received a call from my cardiologist. As expected, the various tests I had completed all proved to be normal. However, a cardiac CT scan had surprisingly identified a rare and life-threatening anomaly. It seemed I suffered from a condition which occurs in less than one per cent of the population and could (though might not) lead to me becoming a victim of sudden cardiac death. Open heart surgery beckoned five weeks later. I was not seriously ill before my surgery; tests were sparked by a single fainting episode and a low heart rate detected via an App. Neither the cardiologist nor my 47 year-old self expected such an outcome. Open-heart surgery is serious business, recovery takes about six months to be on the right side of ‘normal’ and another six before you are ‘fully’ recovered. Thankfully, long-term prognosis is excellent and I have recently been discharged from the cardiologists’ care.

What then was my experience of returning to work after a lengthy absence? Here, I provide an intimate introspective account and hope it provides food for thought for future managerial research in the health and well-being arena.

It should be noted that an income protection policy meant I did not have to worry about money during my absence from work, a privilege that is not afforded to many others with long term illness.

Full text (PDF)

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Learning to live with irregular migration: towards a more ambitious debate on the politics of ‘the problem’

an article by Anne McNevin (The New School for Social Research, New York, USA) published in Citizenship Studies Volume 21 Issue 3 (2017)

Abstract

What might be gained by learning to live with ‘the problem’ of irregular migration, rather than attempting to solve it?

This article engages two senses of ‘the problem’ at stake: first, the ongoing nature of displacement and migration and second, the contested justice claims that sit behind different policy perspectives.

The second sense of the problem (its political dimension) is rarely addressed explicitly in public debate. Yet direct engagement with the political dimension offers the potential to unlock debate from a polarised impasse. To make this argument, I first diagnose debate on irregular migration in terms of three archetypal positions and examine their implicit justice claims.

I then argue for a more ambitious debate that pushes contending justice claims to their logical extensions.

Debate of this kind requires a more coherent defence of justice claims, whether they are based in communitarian, cosmopolitan, anti-capitalist or hybrid values with respect to citizenship and political community. The article concludes with an illustration of how this approach can generate momentum for less circular, more sustainable and politically achievable policy responses.

The argument is made with reference to illustrative examples from Australia and Europe but holds for a variety of contexts where ‘the problem’ is framed in similar ways.

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Tuesday’s Trivia: ten items that are not work-related

Study: How Fish Fins Evolved to Become Human Fingers
via Big Think by Paul Ratner

While there are a number of theories of how life on Earth began (perhaps in hydrothermal vents at the bottom of oceans), one hypothesis is that eventually the early life forms transformed into something between fish and lizards, developing an ability to walk on land. Filling in some crucial details in this idea, researchers from the University of Chicago now showed that human hands have an evolutionary connection to fish fins.
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10 facts about the recorder
via OUP Blog by Louise Gallagher

You might associate the recorder with memories of a second grade classroom and sounds vaguely resembling the tune of “Three Blind Mice” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” While the recorder has become a popular instrument in music education, it also has an extensive and interesting history.
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The most logical logical fallacy of them all, the existential fallacy
via Boing Boing by David McRaney

Hypothetical situations involving dragons, robots, spaceships, and vampires have all been used to prove and disprove arguments.
Statements about things that do not exist can still be true, and can be useful thinking tools for exploring philosophical, logical, sociological, and scientific concepts.
The problem is that sometimes those same arguments accidentally require those fictional concepts to be real in order to support their conclusions, and that’s when you commit the existential fallacy.
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The Long 20th Century of Terror
via 3 Quarks Daily: Robert Zaretsky at The American Scholar

Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David (Wikimedia Commons)
Terrorism is as old as recorded history. Plutarch describes how ancient Spartans would ambush and kill a few enslaved helots every year to keep the rest in a state of terror. A few centuries later, according to Josephus, the Jewish Zealots earned the moniker sicarii, or dagger men, thanks to their practice of slitting the throats of Roman officials in crowded marketplaces. The dagger was also the weapon of choice for the Assassins, a medieval Shiite sect dedicated to the destruction of both the Sunnis and the Crusaders. For more than a millennium, a Hindu offshoot known as the Thuggees strangled unsuspected travelers as offerings to the goddess Kali.
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The Forbidden City to Convict’s Landing: rare early city maps – in pictures
via the Guardian

From London when it had only one bridge, to a pictorial rendition of Sir Francis Drake’s invasion of Santo Domingo, these global city maps date back to the 1500s and are taken from Great City Maps, published by DK
See for yourself

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17 flowers that look like something else
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder

Here’s a gallery of flowers, mainly orchids, that look like monkeys, Darth Vader, naked men, human lips, dancing girls, laughing bumble bees, swaddled babies, parrots, human skulls, flying ducks, tiger heads, happy aliens, angels, doves, ballerinas, egrets, and moths.
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The old age of the world
via OUP Blog by Ben Hutchinson
At the home of the world’s most authoritative dictionary, perhaps it is not inappropriate to play a word association game. If I say the word “modern,” what comes into your mind? The chances are, it will be some variation of “new,” “recent,” or “contemporary.” This understanding of modernity is so ingrained that we rarely pause to reflect on its historical implications. Yet there is another way of conceiving the term, one that brings with it a whole different set of associations. What if we were to turn the telescope around, like Copernicus, and view modernity not as a new beginning, but as an end, as a period that is defined by the fact that it comes after everything else? What, in short, if we were to understand modernity as the old age of the world?
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The surprising spryness of fighters in 15th C armor
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Paris's Musée national du Moyen Âge teamed up with The University of Geneva to make this video demonstrating the fighting techniques available to people in 15th century armor, which are much more fluid and athletic that I had presumed – turns out you can really move in those tin cans.
Watch the video here

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Flight of the bumblebee: survey finds individual personalities
via The Guardian by Press Association

Photograph: FLPA/Rex Shutterstock
A study has found that bumblebees have distinct personalities.
Some bees play it safe by returning to the same flowers again and again while others search for new sources of nectar, scientists found.
The researchers, from Queen Mary University of London, tracked four bumblebees from birth to death, recording a total of 244 flights covering a distance of more than 110 miles.
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Saving Science
Science isn’t self-correcting, it’s self-destructing. To save the enterprise, scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world.
via Arts & Letters Daily: Daniel Sarewitz in The New Atlantis
Science, pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble. Stoked by fifty years of growing public investments, scientists are more productive than ever, pouring out millions of articles in thousands of journals covering an ever-expanding array of fields and phenomena. But much of this supposed knowledge is turning out to be contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong. From metastatic cancer to climate change to growth economics to dietary standards, science that is supposed to yield clarity and solutions is in many instances leading instead to contradiction, controversy, and confusion. Along the way it is also undermining the four-hundred-year-old idea that wise human action can be built on a foundation of independently verifiable truths. Science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex; to escape, it will have to abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.
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‘Disappearing workers’: Foxconn in Europe and the changing role of temporary work agencies

an article by Rutvica Andrijasevic (University of Bristol, UK) and Devi Sacchetto (University of Padua, Italy) published in Work, employment and society Volume 31 Issue 1 (February 2017)

Abstract

This article investigates the role of temporary work agencies (TWAs) at Foxconn’s assembly plants in the Czech Republic.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it shows TWAs’ comprehensive management of migrant labour: recruitment and selection in the countries of origin; cross-border transportation, work and living arrangements in the country of destination; and return to the countries of origin during periods of low production. The article asks whether the distinctiveness of this specific mode of labour management can be understood adequately within the framework of existing theories on the temporary staffing industry.

In approaching the staffing industry through the lens of migration labour analysis, the article reveals two key findings.

Firstly, TWAs are creating new labour markets but do so by eroding workers’ rights and enabling new modalities of exploitation.

Secondly, the diversification of TWAs’ roles and operations has transformed TWAs from intermediaries between capital and labour to enterprises in their own right.

Hazel’s comment:
Yet another way that has been found of creating a workforce with few, if any, rights. I suspect that it would be easier in countries with land borders.

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Crafting a Calling: The Mediating Role of Calling Between Challenging Job Demands and Turnover Intention

an article by Tiago Esteves and Miguel Pereira Lopes (University of Lisbon, Portugal) published in Journal of Career Development Volume 44 Issue 1 (2017)

Abstract

Despite the emerging interest in the job crafting construct, researchers know little about its dimensions and their potential benefits for organizations.

In a quantitative investigation, using a self-report questionnaire among a group of 189 Portuguese nurses and nursing assistants, we analyze how job crafting can be strongly related to workers’ sense of calling and turnover intention.

The results indicate that sense of calling totally mediated the negative relation between the increase in challenging job demands and turnover intention. Although traditional assumption is that a sense of calling leads workers to craft their jobs, we theorize about the potential reverse path, given that our results support the possibility that sense of calling may be triggered when workers increase their own challenging job demands.

We recommend further research to provide additional insight into job crafting formation mechanism.

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National and local labour force projections for the UK

an article by Ludi Simpson (University of Manchester, UK) published in Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit Volume 32 Issue 2 (March 2017)

Abstract

Labour force forecasts are required by local planning, legally guided in the UK by regulations on land use. Methods of forecasting the labour force, and data available for UK practice, are reviewed here.

A best strategy for sub-national forecasts of the labour supply is found empirically to involve an accurate national forecast with a local starting point. Key trends are the decreasing economic activity of young adults, the increasing activity of older adults and the impact of changing state pension age.

However, there exists neither an acceptable national forecast of economic activity nor a standard approach to local forecasts. Software for implementation of sub-national forecasts is described, and six types of scenarios are listed to aid local planning, which reflect uncertainty about current trends and the impact of changes in policy.

Research and development of forecasting the national and the local labour force is urgently needed.

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Privacy and Territoriality Issues in an Online Social Learning Portal

an article by Mohd Anwar (North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC, USA) and Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA) published in International Journal of Information Security and Privacy Volume 11 Issue 1 (January-March 2017)

Abstract

Following the popularity of Wikipedia, community authoring systems are increasingly in use as content sharing outlets.

As such, a Web-based portal for sharing of user-generated content (e.g., course notes, quiz answers, etc.) shows prospect to be a great tool for social E-Learning. Among others, students are expected to be active contributors in such systems in order to offer and receive peer-help. However, privacy and territoriality concerns can be potential barriers to wide adoption of such technology.

Understanding the preference for sharing learning content is the first step to address privacy and territoriality concerns of content providers. The authors conduct a survey among students in four university courses in order to learn their preference for sharing notes and quiz answers with three target groups: instructor, peer, and stranger (i.e., someone outside their class).

The authors also examine the preference for acceptable method of sharing by inquiring about three methods: “anonymous sharing,” “pseudonymous sharing,” and “sharing with name”. They further investigate the importance of “content type,” “sharing method,” and “accessor type” on the preference for sharing.

The survey also reveals respondents’ self-reported reasons for controlling access to their generated learning content. The survey data indicate that even though the respondents have various levels of concerns, almost all of them are willing to share.

The authors observe relationships between content type and respondents’ preference over each of these parameters: accessor type, commentator type, and sharing method.

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Working Too Hard Can Increase Your Risk of Depression

a blog post by Andrew G. Rosen published by Jobacle


a trifle OTT me thinks but …

Whether or not to you tend to enjoy work, most people would agree that working too hard can get the best of you. Sleepless nights, endless deadlines, less time to spend doing other fun stuff outside of work. Well, it’s not just a bummer to find yourself working too hard, studies say that it actually increases your risk of suffering from depression. But it doesn’t stop there. Not only does working too hard increase your risk of depression, but it also doubles the risk.

A European study published in the journal PLoS ONE shared these findings and said that people who work more than 11 eleven hours a day are at the highest risk of having negative side effects. Researchers at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and the University College in London studied 2,000 middle-aged people who worked for the government to what they could find.

Continue reading with links to the original research

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and so to Sunday

E.T. Could Already Be Among Us and We Wouldn't Know, Says NASA
via Big Think by Robby Berman

In Episode 146, late in the run of Star Trek – The Next Generation, its writers finally addressed an obvious issue with science fiction: How come no matter where we go out there, aliens look roughly like us? Obviously, the real answer is that they’re played by human actors, but science fiction has helped instill in us a prevalent bias toward expecting extraterrestrial beings to have arms, legs, heads, not to mention spines, skin, and so on. Little green men are still men, after all.
But even on earth, we don’t represent the norm. There are many more insects than there are humans, and in the oceans? Yipes. Consider giant tube worms.
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These are radio drama staircases
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

These unusual “radio drama staircases” are inside the BBC's sound studios. When an actor is recorded walking up or down the stairs, the different surfaces (wood, carpet, cement) give the acoustic impression of unique locations for the radio drama. Samuel West shot the image above at BBC's Maida Vale Studios. Apparently, they are actually functioning staircases that lead somewhere in the building.
See one more picture at Boing Boing or click above to go to Samuel West’s Twitter account.

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The Known: Cancer Is Really, Really Old. The Unknown: How Common It Was
via 3 Quarks Daily: George Johnson in The New York Times
Carcinogens abounded 1.7 million years ago in Early Pleistocene times when a nameless protohuman wandered the South African countryside in what came to be known as the Cradle of Humankind. Then, as now, ultraviolet radiation poured from the sun, and radon seeped from granite in the ground. Viruses like ones circulating today scrambled DNA. And there were the body’s own carcinogens, hormones that switch on at certain times of life, accelerating the multiplication of cells and increasing the likelihood of mutations.
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Ancient Supernoval Stardust Is Found in Magnetic Bacterial Crystals
via Big Think by Robby Berman

Artist conception of stardust falling on the ocean (photo: DAVID CARILLET)
About 2.6 million years ago, a gigantic star exploded 300 light years away from earth. The explosion was close enough that if we’d been here, we might well have seen its flash in the sky. As our solar system passed through the cloud of stardust left behind some of its radioactive iron-60 particles fell through the atmosphere, settling at the bottom of the ocean where it amazingly still remains thanks to some hungry ancient bacteria. And the timing of the blast is particularly intriguing because it aligns with a major oceanic extinction event on earth. Toxic stardust could explain it.
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Scrumdiddlyumptious and other Roald Dahlesque words now in the Oxford English Dictionary
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
'
In celebration of the centenary of Roald Dahl’s birth this month, the Oxford English Dictionary has added words and updated entries related to Dahl’s iconic children’s books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG.
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The poverty paradox
via OUP Blog by Andy Sumner
Amartya Sen’s famous study of famines found that people died not because of a lack of food availability in a country, but because some people lacked entitlements to food. Can the same now be applied to the causes of global poverty?
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People being stabbed in medieval art and lovin' it
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Medieval manuscripts were the imageboards of their day, full of murderous rabbits and lewd butts, a new (to me) subgenre is "people who don't seem to mind that they've just been stabbed" -- perhaps the origin of the Black Knight?
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400-year-old Greenland shark is oldest vertebrate animal
via the Guardian by Nicola Davis
Shark, which would have reached sexual maturity at around 150 years, sets new record for longevity as biologists finally develop method to determine age.
She was born during the reign of James I, was a youngster when René Descartes set out his rules of thought and the great fire of London raged, saw out her adolescent years as George II ascended the throne, reached adulthood around the time that the American revolution kicked off, and lived through two world wars. Living to an estimated age of nearly 400 years, a female Greenland shark has set a new record for longevity, scientists have revealed.
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Archaeologists Find 3,000-Year-Old Ball of Yarn
via Lion Brand Yarns by Liza Eckert

Photo via Must Farm Archaeology
While digging in Must Farm, a Bronze Age settlement known as “Britain’s Pompeii”, British archaeologists unearthed yarn that is 3,000 years old. The ball is extremely small and fragile, and the team took great care to clean it off without damaging it, according to their Facebook page. It appears to be made from plant-based fibers, possibly flax or nettle, and was found with other textile artifacts and tools.
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Daily life in Alexandra Palace internment camp
via The National Archives Blog by Mareike Barnusch
Could you live on £1 a week? Especially when you were told you could only buy certain things? This was just one of the rules which operated at Alexandra Palace from 1915 until 1919 – the time when the palace was turned into a civilian internment camp for German, Austrian and Hungarian enemies (FO 383/33).
Not being a local Londoner, it was only by chance that I stumbled across Alexandra Palace. Being German, I was fascinated by its varied and troubled history, particularly with regards to the First World War, and I wanted to find out more. This is exactly what I have been able to do over the past three months in my internship at The National Archives – part of my Public History MA course at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. The vast number of documents available at the archives reveal the almost forgotten history of Alexandra Palace.
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Saturday selection

What does scaramouche mean?
via Abe Books by Richard Davies

Ever wondered what Freddie Mercury and Queen were singing about in Bohemian Rhapsody when you hear ‘Scaramouche, Scaramouche. Will you do the fandango?’
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Gorgeous triple spiral of 15K dominoes comes tumbling down
via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Watch it here and do not blame me if you watch it again, and again

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The Plague Underground
via 3 Quarks Daily by Genese Sodikoff
Recent outbreaks of the bubonic plague in Madagascar offer a glimpse into the dynamics of past outbreaks, the Plague of Justinian (sixth to eighth centuries), the Black Death (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), and current wave of “Third Pandemic” plagues that began in the nineteenth century. Over the past few years, genetic studies of the bacillus, Yersinia pestis, have revealed why the pathogen was so devastating, killing tens of millions over centuries. Yet much about it remains mysterious.
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Fastolf not ‘Falstaf’: the soldier behind Shakespeare’s myth
via The National Archives blog by Benjamin Trowbridge
‘What is in that word honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible then? Yea to the dead…’
This speech from Henry IV Part 1 uttered by Shakespeare’s much loved character Falstaff should hopefully amuse even the most novice of Shakespeare lovers. As a pillar of self-interest with cowardly tendencies and no regard for honour, Falstaff’s antihero qualities have been enjoyed by audiences past and present. It seems that no act of ignominy or debasement fazes him!
Continue reading

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Esperanto, chocolate, and biplanes in Braille: the interests of Arthur Maling
via OUP Blog by Peter Gilliver
The Oxford English Dictionary is the work of people: many thousands of them. In my work on the history of the Dictionary I have found the stories of many of those people endlessly fascinating. Very often an individual will enter the story who cries out to be made the subject of a biography in his or her own right; others, while not quite fascinating enough for that, are still sufficiently interesting that they could be a dangerous distraction to me when I was trying to concentrate on the main task of telling the story of the project itself. If I had included pen-portraits of them all, the book would have become hopelessly unwieldy; I have said as much as I can about many of them, but in many cases there is more to be said. One of those about whom I would have liked to say more is Arthur Thomas Maling, who worked as one of James Murray’s assistants for nearly thirty years, and who went on working on the Dictionary for another dozen years or so after Murray’s death in 1915.
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Frodo’s trip to Mordor as a Google Map
via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Includes options for estimated time by foot, boat, or eagle.
Have a look for yourself

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The wizard of Oxford: what Tolkien could hear in a voice
via New Statesman by Antonia Quirke
Over the radio, J R R Tolkien’s precise and musical voice told us why he'd never have gone to hunt a dragon.
“What would you have done if you had been a little boy, and a wizard had come and asked you to go to the misty mountain and help kill a dragon?” A question put to a 76-year-old J R R Tolkien during an interview in 1968. Tolkien amusedly shot back: “I’d been very well brought up to avoid conversations with dubious old gentlemen, and would have retired into the house and asked my mother.”
This is one of many memorable out-takes from a BBC documentary about the writer, never heard until now.
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Unfortunately there is no link to the broadcast to which Ms Quirke refers. And anyway this article is six months old as I am typing this and will be even older by the time it gets into one of my trivia posts.
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‘Giving the Turks a drubbing’: The Battle of Romani
via National Archives by Dr Juliette Desplat and Dr George Hay
100 years [plus several months] ago, on 3-5 August 1916, the Battle of Romani was taking place 23 miles east of the Suez Canal. In what was to be the last attack of the war on Egypt and the Suez Canal, it was a convincing victory and marked the beginning of the British advance into the Sinai desert.
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Hazel’s comment:
Reading this I wonder whether it is possible after all this time to discover whether a certain individual was involved. I suppose if I could discover his rank and regiment/unit it would help. Family tree research calls me since I know that Poppa (as we youngsters all called our mother’s father) served in the Middle East. 

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Map of All the Rail Lines Ever Across UK and Ireland
via Research Buzz Firehose
New-to-me: remember that map of streetcar lines I mentioned recently? How about a map of all the rail lines that ever existed in the UK and Ireland? “Base layers can be toggled between Google Maps, satellite, OpenStreetMap and old Ordnance Survey maps.”
Check it out for yourself

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The mystery of the missing craters on Ceres
Astronomers have puzzled over the lack of large craters on our nearest dwarf planet. Has a computer simulation helped reveal their fate?
via The Guardian by Ian Sample

A view of Ceres’ largest well-preserved 175-mile impact crater, Kerwan.
The colour-coding indicates elevation (blue = low; red = high).
Photograph: Southwest Research Institute/Simone Marchi.
When Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft arrived at Ceres last year the images it beamed back were puzzling. The nearest dwarf planet to Earth was missing the massive craters that astronomers thought would heavily scar the surface.
As the Dawn probe swung around the body, the largest in the asteroid belt, its cameras recorded pictures of pockmarked terrain. But even though small craters dotted the Cerean surface, none were larger than the 175-mile-wide dent that is the Kerwan impact crater.
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Clarity needed in training the ‘temps’: Agency staff’s greater risk of work-related disorders

an article by Brian Beal (affiliation not provided) published in Human Resource Management International Digest Volume 25 Issue 2 (2017)

Abstract

Purpose
Research shows that the risk of work-related disorders is higher among temporary agency workers than among other employees. The purpose of this paper is to describe the working conditions of temporary agency workers and explains which factors contribute towards work-related disorders for this group.

Design/methodology/approach
This paper is based on a survey responded to by 482 agency workers in Sweden. The dependent variable is the prevalence of work-related disorders. Independent variables include personal characteristics, job characteristics, employment characteristics and temporary agency work characteristics.

Findings
The study indicates several risk factors: holding a position as a blue-collar worker; being assigned to more physically demanding work tasks and having fewer opportunities to learn new things than client organization employees; lacking training for work tasks; and lacking clarity regarding which work tasks to do during an assignment.

Originality/value
The theoretical implications of this study are related to the dual employment–management relationship in temporary agency work where the temporary work agency and client organization follow different logics. The logic in the employment relationship is to contract temporary agency workers out to client organizations; thus, there is no time for formal training. The logic in the management relationship lies in making temporary agency workers profitable as soon as possible, encouraging shortcuts in training and instruction; thus, temporary agency workers risk being left with a lack of clarity regarding what to do and how to do it.

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A superb selection of trivial items

Want to Be Successful? Don't Act Like a Lady
via Big Think by Lori Chandler

The trope of women hating on other women is frequently played out on our movie screens and think pieces du jour. A recent New York Times opinion piece postulated that cattiness comes from hating oneself, which resonates as an accurate analysis: Insecurity breeds contempt. Still, it’s natural that we must compete with one another for evolutionary purposes, to attract the best mate, even as our culture enforced it’s not lady-like. What do you do when you live in a society that tells us it’s not nice to compete, but your instincts are saying that you must?
Continue reading and you will discover that the opinion piece referred to above is over a year old but heck, who said interesting items also had to be contemporary?
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Don't pee on a jellyfish sting, and other venom no-nos
via Boing Boing by Carla Sinclair

Venom expert Dr. Christie Wilcox debunks three popular myths about stings and bites from toxic creatures: jellyfish, snakes and spiders.
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Fastolf not ‘Falstaf’: the soldier behind Shakespeare’s myth
via The National Archives blog by Benjamin Trowbridge
‘What is in that word honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible then? Yea to the dead…’
This speech from Henry IV Part 1 uttered by Shakespeare’s much loved character Falstaff should hopefully amuse even the most novice of Shakespeare lovers. As a pillar of self-interest with cowardly tendencies and no regard for honour, Falstaff’s antihero qualities have been enjoyed by audiences past and present. It seems that no act of ignominy or debasement fazes him!
Continue reading

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An egalitarian and organic history of the periodic table
via OUP Blog by Eric Scerri
Our story has to begin somewhere and why not with the Manchester schoolteacher John Dalton who revived the atomic theory of the ancient Greek philosophers? In addition to supposing that the ultimate components of all matter were atoms, Dalton set about putting this idea on a quantitative foundation.
He published the first list in which he compared the weights of the atoms of all the elements that were known at the time. Dalton did this by assigning a weight of one unit to the lightest element, namely hydrogen. Next he assumed that a compound like water consisted of one atom of hydrogen and one of oxygen. By appealing to data on how much hydrogen combines chemically with how much oxygen, he arrived at the weight of one atom of oxygen relative to the weight of a hydrogen atom and so on for all the other elements. Of course the formula of water is now known as “H₂O” rather than “HO” but this was already a good start.
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Things I miss: Vent Windows
via Boing Boing by Jason Weisberger

By the late 1980s an automotive feature that I love, colloquially known as Vent Windows, or Wing Windows, or Bat Wings had largely been phased out.
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The life and work of H.G. Wells: a timeline
via OUP Blog by Lauri Lu

The thirteenth of August [2016] marks the 150th birth and the 70th death anniversary of legendary science fiction writer H.G. Wells. A prophet of modern progress, he accurately predicted several historical milestones, from the World War II, nuclear weapons, to Wikipedia. His humble origins gave him insight into class issues, and his studies in biology propelled him to become one of the greatest thinkers and observers of his time. Combined with a flair for story-telling, Herbert George Wells dominated and defines the science fiction genre till this day. His 1895 published novel, The Time Machine, propelled him to fame and inspired studies and speculation from later generations of physicists and theorists.
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New Site Maps 150,000 Images of London, England
via RBFirehose: Feargus O'Sullivan in The Atlantic
With over 150,000 pictures now mapped across the city, a new digital photo archive of the city of London is so rich in content it’s almost too much to cope with.
Launched last week, Collage, The London Picture Map allows you to trace London’s visual history street by street. Supported by the City of London Corporation, it’s the result of two full years of digitizing and mapping images from the London Metropolitan Archive and the Guildhall Art Gallery, which together possess the largest collection of London images in the world.
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Elaborate DIY parking spot
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Kudos to this guy for all the work he had to do to come up with a way to park his car. He is stuck with the particular car model for life, though, because it fits like a glove.
Check it out here

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Water tunnel found beneath Mayan ruin that provided ruler a path to underworld
via The Guardian by Associated Press in Mexico City

The Temple of Inscriptions at the archaeological site of Palenque, in the state of Chiapas, where archaeologists found a network of underground water canals dating from the seventh century. Photograph: INAH/AFP/Getty Images
Archaeologists find seventh century system below Palenque, which houses tomb of Pakal whose sarcophagus some erroneously believe depicts him in spaceship.
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Can the World Sustain 9 Billion People by 2050?
via Big Think by Philip Perry

The world’s population is topsy-turvy, and its exponential and uneven growth could have disastrous consequences if we aren’t ready for it. Humanity recently hit a benchmark, a population of 7.9 billion in 2013. It is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, and 9.6 billion by 2050. If that weren’t enough, consider 11.2 billion in 2100. Most of the growth is supposed to come from nine specific countries: India, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nigeria, the United States, and Indonesia.
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Creating the Boiler Room Environment: The Job Demand-Control-Support Model as an Explanation for Workplace Bullying

Alan K. Goodboy, Matthew M. Martin, Jennifer M. Knight and Zachary Long (West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA) published in Communication Research Volume 42 Issue 2 (March 2017)

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explain workplace bullying as a symptom of high-strain employment. The Job Demand-Control-Support (JDCS) model of work design was used to frame this study and examine workplace bullying antecedents and consequences.

Full-time American employees (N = 314) working in various organizations completed a questionnaire about their bullying experiences, working environments, and occupational outcomes. Results revealed that workplace bullying was correlated with expected negative outcomes at work (i.e., job dissatisfaction, job stress, anxiety).

In line with JDCS model predictions, employees who worked at organizations characterized by high psychological demands, low control, and low supervisor social support (i.e., an additive model) reported more workplace bullying (supporting an iso-strain hypothesis).

Results of a moderated moderation analysis revealed a significant three-way interaction between demands, control, and support (supporting a buffering hypothesis); under workplace conditions characterized by low supervisor social support, employee control over how work was completed buffered the negative effect of job demands on workplace bullying.

Supervisors, then, should consider how promoting employee autonomy and communicating social support to employees might nullify workplace conditions that encourage bullying, especially when work is particularly demanding.

Full text (PDF)

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Workplace bullying complaints: lessons for “good HR practice”

an article by Bevan Catley, Kate Blackwood, Darryl Forsyth and David Tappin (Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand) and Tim Bentley (New Zealand Work Research Institute, AUT University, New Zealand) published in Personnel Review Volume 46 Issue 1 (2017)

Abstract

Purpose
Current research provides an incomplete picture of the challenges facing human resource personnel (HRP) tasked with managing a workplace bullying complaint. The purpose of this paper is to provide a holistic model of the complaint management process in order to advance the theorising of HRP’s role in this important process, and the challenges they face in undertaking it.

Design/methodology/approach
Cases of workplace bullying heard before the legal system were analysed – a novel data source in research on workplace bullying. Thematic analysis was undertaken on the case determinations to identify the challenges HRP faced that prevented the resolution of the complaint.

Findings
The analysis indicated two key phases in the complaints management process with five associated challenges. The first two challenges were related to HRP’s ability to assess the substance of the complaint. HRP’s ability or inability to “sort out” conflicting accounts and to follow the process saw the complaint follow one of three “resolution pathways”. Three further challenges were associated with HRP communicating the outcome to the complainant. Failure to overcome these challenges left the complainant aggrieved at the unfairness in which their complaint had been handled – triggering legal action.

Originality/value
This paper draws on a novel data source to provide a holistic model of the complaint management process related to workplace bullying which details the various components and challenges related to HRP throughout the process. Alongside advancing theory, this research has practical value for improving HR practice.

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‘I don’t know where to find the careers adviser … he has disappeared’: the impact of changes to careers advice on 14–16 year olds in University Technical Colleges and schools

an article by Daniel K. Acquah, Hayley Limmer and Debra Malpass (Centre for Education Research and Practice, AQA Education, Manchester, UK) published in Research Papers in Education Volume 32 Issue 2 (2017)

Abstract

Recent policies in England have enacted significant changes to careers information advice and guidance (CIAG) and work-related learning (WRL). This paper offers insight into these changes from the perspective of young people studying engineering at University Technical Colleges (UTCs) as well as ‘comprehensive’ schools.

Face-to-face CIAG was conspicuously absent from the young people’s decision to pursue engineering. Whilst they were studying engineering, the young people at the comprehensive schools had quite variable experiences of receiving CIAG and WRL. Although there were instances of young people receiving careers advice from teachers, careers advisors or employers, many young people had not received this input.

As well as accessing advice from a careers teacher or advisor more frequently, the UTC students were also much more inclined to be explicitly positive about this advice. Many young people had positive work experience placements.

They felt that the experience had given them a greater understanding of ‘what it’s like to be in a workplace’. However, not all students had such positive experiences. They told us that it could be ‘extremely hard’ to find a place, especially one related to the course of study.

We relate the findings to the current policy context and implications for the UTC model.

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Tuesday's Trivia. I wonder what Facebook will do with matching image to words!!

The Mystery of Hieronymus Bosch
via 3 Quarks Daily: Ingrid D. Rowland at The New York Review of Books

Hieronymus Bosch: The Wayfarer, circa 1500–1510
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
There has never been a painter quite like Jheronimus van Aken, the Flemish master who signed his works as Jheronimus Bosch. His imagination ranged from a place beyond the spheres of Heaven to the uttermost depths of Hell, but for many of his earliest admirers the most striking aspect of his art was what they described as its “truth to nature”. The five hundredth anniversary of his death in 1516 has inspired two comprehensive exhibitions, at the Noordbrabants Museum in his hometown of ’s-Hertogenbosch and at Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado, as well as an ambitious project to analyze all of his surviving work, drawn, painted, and printed, according to the latest scientific techniques (the Bosch Research and Conservation Project). Yet despite all we have learned through these undertakings – and it is a great deal – the man his neighbors knew as “Joen the painter” remains as mysterious as ever.
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Twice bottled grief: the defiant life of Tony Garnett
via the New Statesman by Melissa Benn
Garnett’s potent memoir The Day the Music Died shows a life defined by the refusal of even the most ordinary levels of mendacity.
Unlike Ken Loach, his friend and frequent collaborator, Tony Garnett remains a shadowy figure in the story of British radical film-making – yet has been just as vital, responsible for a string of pioneer productions from Cathy Come Home and Kes to Law and Order and This Life. Reflecting on some of the emotional reasons for his relatively low public profile, he comes to the conclusion that it is because “I didn’t want to lie”.
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A Copernican eye-opener
via OUP Blog by Owen Gingerich
Approximately 500 years ago a Polish lawyer, medical doctor, and churchman got a radical idea: that the earth was not fixed solidly in the middle of all space, but was spinning at a thousand miles per hour at its equator, and was speeding around the sun at a dizzying rate. Unbelievable, critics said. If that were true, at the equator people would be spun off into space. And it would be much harder to walk west than east.
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Amazing, horizontal lightning bolt
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

If this was a special effect, we'd call it fakey looking, but apparently it’s real lightning, captured in Tampa and posted to Reddit by UnobtrusiveElephant.
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10 facts about the trombone
via OUP Blog by Aviva Leshaw

Tuba, trumpet, trombone…which one should you pick up this fall? Read below to learn what makes the trombone the right choice, and to find out a little more about this bass instrument’s long history.
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This Website Shows Which Movies Are Perfect For You
via MakeUseOf by Joel Lee
Here’s the weird thing about our brains: we think that having more choice is good, but that often leads us to analysis paralysis. We spend so much effort trying to pick one of the many choices that we end up giving up and picking none thanks to indecision!
One way to solve this problem is to “sift” through and separate the quality movies from the not-so-quality ones. But that can be a time-consuming process. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a tool that handled all of that for you?
Well, thanks to a user on Reddit, that tool now exists.
Check it out for yourself

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This titanium-infused quartz crystal is totally mesmerizing
via Boing Boing by Zeni Jardin
You have to see for yourself

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Landmarks, shelter, air filters – trees are our friends
We may no longer rely on their wood for wheels or fish hooks, but trees are essential to our lives
Via The Guardian by Fiona Stafford

An oak tree in Sherwood Forest. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
Burnt Oak, Gospel Oak, Poplar, St John’s Wood. These are all stops on the Transport for London map, but their names carry dim recollections of a world older than the Underground. The rail network is haunted by memories of trees – Poplar is called after the trees that once flourished there, along the banks of the Thames and the Black Ditch, one of London’s many lost rivers. In centuries past, St John’s Wood was part of the great forest of Middlesex, variously feared for its robber gangs and famous as a rich hunting ground for kings. Gospel Oak was a huge oak tree, marking the parish boundary of St Pancras and Hampstead, which became an outdoor church for nonconformist preachers and their enormous congregations during the 18th century.
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Ozone Hole Could Be Completely Healed by 2050
via Big Think by Natalie Shoemaker

The Earth’s atmosphere is on the mend, according to an article published in Science. It took almost 30 years for the ban on ozone-depleting substances, like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), to work and scientists are saying if this trend continues, the ozone could be completely healed by the middle of the century. It’s a wonder what environmental policies can do for our health.
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How China is rewriting the book on human origins
via 3 Quarks Daily: Jane Qiu in Nature
On the outskirts of Beijing, a small limestone mountain named Dragon Bone Hill rises above the surrounding sprawl. Along the northern side, a path leads up to some fenced-off caves that draw 150,000 visitors each year, from schoolchildren to grey-haired pensioners. It was here, in 1929, that researchers discovered a nearly complete ancient skull that they determined was roughly half a million years old. Dubbed Peking Man, it was among the earliest human remains ever uncovered, and it helped to convince many researchers that humanity first evolved in Asia.
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The Quality of Work in a Changing Labour Market

an article by Duncan Gallie (Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK) published in Social Policy & Administration Volume 52 Number 2 (March 2017)

Abstract

There have been sharply contrasting scenarios of the long-term pattern of change in the quality of work and employment in the advanced societies.

Three broad perspectives have dominated enquiry in the last three decades:

• an optimistic tradition emphasizing progressive improvement in skills and the quality of work;
• a pessimistic tradition underlining emerging threats to employment and job quality; and, lastly,
• an institutional tradition pointing to long-term structural differences between societies.

We start by briefly outlining some of the key contrasts between these scenarios and then review the current state of empirical research with respect to three key aspects of the quality of work and employment: the structure of skills; the intrinsic quality of work in terms of job control and work intensity; and, lastly, job insecurity.

Full text (PDF)

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Steady improvement of European labour market conditions according to Joint Employment Report

European Commission: Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion News

On 3 March, the European Council of employment and social policy ministers adopted the 2017 Joint Employment Report.

The report takes a snapshot of the employment and social situation across the EU. It also highlights the extent of reforms carried out in the Member States over the past year. A draft version was presented by the Commission in November 2016 as part of the Autumn Package launching the European Semester.

The report points out the steady improvement of labour market conditions in Europe. The unemployment rate kept falling and stood at 8.5% (10% in the euro area) in the third quarter of 2016. The employment rate in 2016 was, for the first time, above the levels recorded before the crisis. If the current trend continues, the 75% employment rate target set by the Europe 2020 strategy for 2020 could be within reach.

The report also shows that, despite first signals of convergence among Member States, employment and social outcomes continue to vary significantly across countries.

As also shown by the scoreboard of Key Employment and Social Indicators, which is part of the report,

• unemployment, youth unemployment and poverty levels remain far too high in many parts of Europe;
• labour market and social outcomes also vary by gender, age and education for example;
• despite a recent overall stabilisation, income inequality remains high in many EU countries with potential negative implications for economic output and inclusive and sustainable growth.

Many Member States have implemented important reform agendas in recent years, with positive effects on job creation. This efforts need to continue to promote the creation of quality jobs and increase the inclusiveness of labour markets, including by

• removing barriers to labour market participation,
• tackling labour market segmentation and undeclared work,
• ensuring that social protection systems provide adequate income support,
• enabling services to all while encouraging transitions into employment and making work pay.

Joint Employment Report 2017 - accompanying the Communication from the Commission on the Annual Growth Survey 2017
PDF but on my laptop it is not readable online and has to be downloaded

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Combining Labour Force Survey data to estimate migration flows: the case of migration from Poland to the UK

an article by Arkadiusz Wiśniowski (University of Manchester, UK) published in   Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) Volume 180 Issue 1 (January 2017)

Summary

In May 2004, Poland and seven other countries from central and eastern Europe joined the European Union. This led to a massive emigration from Poland, especially to the UK. However, relatively little is known about the magnitude of migration flows after the 2004 enlargement of the European Union.

In the paper Labour Force Survey data from the sending and receiving countries are utilized in a Bayesian model to estimate migration flows. The estimates are further combined with the output of the ‘Integrated modelling of European migration’ model.

The combined results with accompanying measures of uncertainty can be used to validate other reported estimates of migration flows from Poland to the UK.

Full text (PDF)

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Steady improvement of European labour market conditions according to Joint Employment Report

On 3 March, the European Council of employment and social policy ministers adopted the 2017 Joint Employment Report.

The report takes a snapshot of the employment and social situation across the EU. It also highlights the extent of reforms carried out in the Member States over the past year. A draft version was presented by the Commission in November 2016 as part of the Autumn Package launching the European Semester.

The report points out the steady improvement of labour market conditions in Europe. The unemployment rate kept falling and stood at 8.5% (10% in the euro area) in the third quarter of 2016. The employment rate in 2016 was, for the first time, above the levels recorded before the crisis. If the current trend continues, the 75% employment rate target set by the Europe 2020 strategy for 2020 could be within reach.

The report also shows that, despite first signals of convergence among Member States, employment and social outcomes continue to vary significantly across countries.

As also shown by the scoreboard of Key Employment and Social Indicators, which is part of the report,

• unemployment, youth unemployment and poverty levels remain far too high in many parts of Europe;
• labour market and social outcomes also vary by gender, age and education for example;
• despite a recent overall stabilisation, income inequality remains high in many EU countries with potential negative implications for economic output and inclusive and sustainable growth.

Many Member States have implemented important reform agendas in recent years, with positive effects on job creation. This efforts need to continue to promote the creation of quality jobs and increase the inclusiveness of labour markets, including by

• removing barriers to labour market participation,
• tackling labour market segmentation and undeclared work,
• ensuring that social protection systems provide adequate income support,
• enabling services to all while encouraging transitions into employment and making work pay.

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Judgement without justice: on the efficacy of the European human rights régime

an article by Petra Guasti (Czech Academyu of Sciences, Institute of Sociology, Czech Republic), David S. Siroky (Arizona State University, Tempe, USA) and Daniel Stockemer (University of Ottawa, Canada) published in Democratization Volume 24 Issue 2 (2017)

Abstract

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is widely regarded as the most important human rights court worldwide. This article investigates the extent to which the court addresses cases from countries with the worst human rights performance. Using a new data set on all ECtHR judgments from 1995–2012, the analysis suggests that the ECtHR does not deliver its judgments against members of the Council of Europe with the worst human rights records, but instead against more democratic and affluent states.

The reason is that litigating in front of a supranational court requires capacities that vulnerable people are unlikely to possess, except when aided by transnational advocacy groups.

However, more judgements are issued against countries that lack independent judiciaries, where cases are less likely to be resolved at the domestic level. While the ECtHR might not address the worst human rights crimes, it plays a subsidiary role in the European human rights protection system by compensating for weak domestic judiciaries.

However, the court's inability to independently pursue litigation, together with the lack of capacity in some countries to bring cases forward, have hampered more effective protection of human rights for the most vulnerable in Europe.

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