10 stories for today (maybe I'll catch up with myself soon)

Examining the ancient technique of “memory palaces” with brain-imaging
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

A small (51 men aged 24 +/- 3 years) study published in Neuron tasked experimental subjects with practicing the ancient Greek mnemonic technique of “memory palaces” and then scanned their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging, comparing the scans to scans from competitive “memory athletes” and also measuring their performance on memorization tasks.
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A Short Analysis of John Keats’s ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’
via Interesting Literature
John Keats wrote a number of sonnets in his short life, and ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’ remains a popular and widely anthologised one. Some words of analysis are useful in highlighting the relevance of Keats’s imagery in this poem, as well as the form and language of the sonnet. The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet rhyming ababcdcdefefgg, which is particularly appropriate here, since in this poem Keats is preoccupied with dying prematurely, before he has had a chance to write his best work and take his place ‘among the English poets’ (as Keats himself put it).
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Richard III: a right royal revelation
via The National Archives blog by Jane Flood
I have always fancied trawling through a field with a metal detector in search of buried treasure, unearthing a Roman mosaic floor of Medusa’s head or just a handful of gold sovereigns. To think that what lies beneath us holds the answers to the mysteries of our past is beyond exciting, but to find a king in a car park was miraculous to say the least. I am of course referring to Richard III.
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Can we have more than one friend? According to Montaigne, no
via OUP Blog by Manuel Bermudez

Title page of the second volume of Montaigne’s Essais, 1588. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The Essais are the perfect mate to accompany anybody, throughout all stages of life. It’s always interesting to explore Michel de Montaigne‘s life and his marvellous book: the Essais. Within his lifespan, Montaigne was able to find true friendship for himself and record its effects therein. Here we propose to navigate Montaigne’s approach to friendship.
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Weimar On My Mind
via 3 Quarks Daily by Brooks Riley
To paraphrase Heinrich Heine, I dream of Weimar in the night – not the era, but the town of Weimar, a lovely word on its own, one steeped in intellectual significance, historical resonance, cultural audacity, political and artistic enlightenment, philosophical bravura – and in modern times monstrous atrocity.
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Edge of darkness: looking into the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way
via the Guardian by Robin McKie
At the heart of our galaxy, a vast black hole is devouring matter from the dust clouds that surround it. Little by little, expanses of interstellar material are being swallowed up by this voracious galactic carnivore that, in the process, has reached a mass that is 4m times that of our sun.
The Milky Way’s great black hole is 25,000 light years distant, surrounded by dense clusters of stars, shrouded by interstellar dust and, like all other black holes, incapable of emitting light.
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Freaky vigilantes of the 1880s Ozarks
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

As a child, writer Lisa Hix visited Silver Dollar City, a surreal theme park in the Ozark Mountains that I have been fortunate enough to experience myself. Like me, Lisa was enchanted with the nutty dark ride Fire In The Hole and its story of people in creepy devil-horned hoods who torched a town. No, they weren't KKK members but rather the Bald Knobbers, a 19th century vigilante group. Over at Collectors Weekly, Lisa explores the history of the Bald Knobbers:
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Women in war – what is being done?
via OUP Blog

The Life of Female Field Intelligence Combat Soldiers by Israel Defense Forces. CC-BY -SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Women experience conflict differently to men, with its various and multiple implications, as refugees, internally displaced persons, combatants, victims of sexual violence, and political and peace activists. Their mobility and ability to protect themselves are often limited during and after conflict, while their ability to take part in peace processes is frequently restricted. But what is being done to change this? How can we better understand women’s roles and experiences, and what is being done to help protect and involve women in conflict zones?

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The Accidental Elitist
Academia is too important to be left to academics
via Arts & Letters Daily: Maximillian Alvarez in The Baffler
“What came first,” in the immortal words of Nick Hornby, “the music or the misery?” During one of the most highly anticipated panels at the biggest academic conference of the year in my field, I’m sitting on the floor with a bunch of other eager dopes who didn’t show up in time to snag a seat. Everyone’s still in high spirits, though. One of the hottest names in “theory” today is running the panel and all the papers sound fascinating, in an obsessive hobbyist sort of way – it all promises to be a thunderous nerdgasm.
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Artificial sweeteners be damned; these naturally occurring, safe proteins are thousands of times sweeter than sugar

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

KSU plant biochemical geneticist Raj Nagarajan describes the properties of Thaumatin, Monellin and Brazzein, all found in west African plants that are generally considered safe for consumption; each is a protein, and they are, respectively, 1,000x, 2,000x, and 3,000x sweeter than sugar.

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Overcoming the Mythology Surrounding Depression

via Big Think by Robby Berman

For a condition that’s so common – affecting one in four women, and roughly one in five men – it’s frustrating that depression still carries a stigma. That it continues to be misunderstood by so many is surprising, especially since it’s likely that there’s someone suffering from depression in all of our lives. No, it’s not a signifier of weakness or self-indulgence or lack of gratitude for one’s circumstances. It’s clearly a result of physiological processes, even if its mechanics aren’t yet completely understood.

Psychologist and psychiatrist Patricia Deldin debunks six common ideas about depression that just aren’t true.
[Please click through to access the short video which to me, as someone who has had a couple of severe depressive episodes in my life, makes a great deal of sense.]

If you suffer from untreated depression, as Deldin says, there is help available.

And remember: It’s not just others who fall for these myths — don’t judge yourself as you endure what’s already a difficult struggle.

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10 interesting stories from model making to UFO believers

A master of miniature model-making shares his hard-earned secrets
via Boing Boing by Gareth Branwyn

I first discovered David Neat’s work via his website where he delves deeply into all sorts of fascinating interests, from furniture design to natural history to art. Mainly what drew me there was his extensive tutorials on all aspects of miniature model-making. The amount of content he’s posted is staggering, as is the quality of everything. Read comments about David’s site (or this book) and you will hear from seasoned pros, surprised by how much they’ve learned from David’s work.
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The Origins of Numbers
via The Scholarly Kitchen by David Crotty
Why do we use the particular symbols we use for the numbers 1 through 10? And why base ten? The video below from Alessandra King offers a brief history of numbers, including the important shift to positional notation and the origins of our Hindu Arabic numeral system.
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Unmanned craft finds naturally-occurring whale fall
via Boing Boing by Andrea James

What happens when a whale dies? It sinks to the ocean floor, creating a whale fall, which becomes a fantastical garden of biodiversity. EVNautilus stumbled on a naturally-occurring whale fall during a live feed, an exceedingly rare find.
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How Popular Websites Have Changed Over the Past 15-20 Years
via Killer Web Directory blog by Administrator
Here is an intriguing infographic that I helped to create with the folks at London based VizionOnline that compares how popular websites looked back in the day to how they look in 2017. View then and now screenshots of websites such as the BBC, ebay, Wikipedia and Google.
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Exoplanet discovery: seven Earth-sized planets found orbiting nearby star
via the Guardian by Ian Semple
A huddle of seven worlds, all close in size to Earth, and perhaps warm enough for water and the life it can sustain, has been spotted around a small, faint star in the constellation of Aquarius.
The discovery, which has thrilled astronomers, has raised hopes that the hunt for alien life beyond the solar system could start much sooner than previously thought, with the next generation of telescopes that are due to switch on in the next decade.
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Bolder than a boulder and other stumps and stones of English orthography
via OUP Blog by Anatoly Liberman

Perhaps the huge size of an average boulder contributed to the preservation of an extra letter in its name?
One good thing about English spelling is that, when you look for some oddity in it, you don’t have to search long. So why do we have the letter u in boulder (and of course in Boulder, the name of a town in Colorado)? If my information is reliable, Boulder was called after Boulder Creek. A boulder near a small stream won’t surprise anyone, but the letter u in the word and the place name may, as journalists like to say, raise some eyebrows. Bolder (the comparative degree of bold), older, colder, folder, and holder do without u, but shoulder, unexpectedly, sides with boulder. American spelling has mold in all its meanings and the verb molder, while the British norm requires ou before l. What is going on here?
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Why some neuroscientists call consciousness “the c-word”
via 3 Quarks Daily by Yohan J. John
As a neuroscientist, I am frequently asked about consciousness. In academic discourse, the celebrated problem of consciousness is often divided into two parts: the "Easy Problem" involves identifying the processes in the brain that correlate with particular conscious experiences. The “Hard Problem” involves murkier questions: what are conscious experiences, and why do they exist at all? This neat separation into Easy and Hard problems, which comes courtesy the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, seems to indicate a division of labor.
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Forbidden places: a journey into Europe's borderlands
via The New Statesman by Caroline Moorhead
Kapka Kassabova’s Border: a Journey to the Edge of Europe is a timely, powerful story of immigration, friendship and travel.
When Kapka Kassabova was in her late thirties, she decided to return to the place where she had grown up, but had not seen for 25 years: the borderlands of eastern Thrace, where Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey meet. Her parents were Bulgarian scientists who, after a spell in the UK, had settled in New Zealand, where, she writes, the Kiwi speech made “fish” sound like “fush” and “chips” like “chups”, where the stars were rearran­ged and the seasons inverted: an “upside-down world, but then it always is, for the immigrant”. It is again as an immigrant, a wanderer, that Kassabova – who now lives in the Scottish Highlands – went to find the forbidden places of her childhood.
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Monet glimpsed through his own words, demons and all
via the Guardian by Sarah Hughes

Monet’s garden at Giverny. Photograph: Seventh Art Productions
The words are those of a man at the end of his tether. “I must have undoubtedly been born under an unlucky star. I’ve just been turned out without even a shirt on my back from the inn in which I was staying. My family refused to help me any more. I don’t know where I’ll sleep. I was so upset yesterday that I was stupid enough to hurl myself into the water. Fortunately no harm was done.”
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A catalogue and history of one of the most pervasive subcultures — UFO believers
via Boing Boing by Peter Bebergal

I am not that interested in speculation on whether aliens have ever visited the Earth. What I am excited about, however, are all the ways we have imagined them, from the earliest grainy photos of saucer shapes in the sky to the orchestral-minded, big-eyed aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the 1950s and 1960s, UFOs became ubiquitous in the pulp magazines and cheap popular paperbacks. With their lurid cover and claims that “Flying Saucers Have Landed,” these publications would set the popular consciousness afire. They also opened up theories of ever sort as to the origins of UFOs and what role the government might play in covering them up. From the hollow Earth, to Mars, to other dimensions, the UFO myth could contain almost any form of conjecture. Jews? Maybe. Men in black? Most certainly. Spiritual avatars leading us to a new age? Let’s hope so.
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7 Problems and Solutions to Helping a Friend with Anxiety

via World of Psychology blog by Dr. Alicia H. Clark for YourTango.com

What they might not be able to ask for but wish you knew.



Most of us who know or love someone who is anxious intend to be supportive, even helpful, in our interactions.
We know to listen and not judge.
To be patient when it’s hard to talk about issues.
We even know to keep our own feelings in check so we don’t rev up an already tense situation.
That said, this is OUR experience of loving them.

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What small businesses need to know about the General Data Protection Regulation

via Bytestart by Stuart Crook a data protection expert and Associate at the national law firm, Stephensons.



Despite Brexit, the UK government has confirmed it will abide by the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is due to come into effect on 28 May 2018.

The aim of General Data Protection Regulation is to encourage companies across the European Union to think seriously about data protection. In practice, the new GDPR lays down some fairly stringent legislation, for both large and small businesses, governing the standards by which personal data is collected and stored.

To help UK businesses understand the new laws, and avoid the heavy punishments failure to abide by them bring, here’s a guide to the GDPR legislation.

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Confessional technologies of the self: From Seneca to social media

an article by Norm Friesen (Boise State University, USA) published in First Monday Volume 22 Number 6 (June 2017)

Abstract

Foucault’s general notion of “technologies of the self” provides an invaluable starting point for investigating a range of broadly “confessional” practices and technologies over time – from medieval confession to contemporary forms of networked identity construction. Foucault defines technologies of the self as “reflected and voluntary practices by which men not only fix rules of conduct for themselves but seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their particular being, and to make their life an oeuvre.”

These are practices or techniques, in other words, that are both undertaken by the self and directed toward it. Specifically confessional technologies involve a deliberate and often structured externalization of the self, often with the help of a confessor or a confessional text or context.

Building on existing work (e.g., by Fletcher and Hall), this paper begins by some of the earliest Western confessional practices and “technologies” as described by Foucault, and then proceeding to explain medieval Christian confession and its subsequent “reformation.”

Next, by appealing to Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation, it develops this conception of confession further, comparing it finally to today’s digital media of social self-disclosure, focusing on Facebook in particular. Such contemporary media, the paper concludes, build upon practices and technologies of the self that have been evolving for centuries, if not millennia.

Full text (HTML)

Hazel’s comment:
I had to work hard to read this article but it was worth it, and the illustrations really do illustrate the text.

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Statistics literacy

a blog post by Sheila Webber

A short article on the Royal Statistical Society's Statslife site by Hetan Shah (RSS Executive Ditector) a few days ago asserts that: Critical thinking and stats literacy are the answers to a post-truth age. It finishes by saying that “We should explore new ways of promoting critical thinking, statistical literacy and a curious mindset among people young and old. As is so often the case, technical and policy fixes can only take us so far; education is the only sustainable answer to this major societal issue.”

Shah, H. (2017, May 17). Critical thinking and stats literacy are the answers to a post-truth age
https://www.statslife.org.uk/features/3460-critical-thinking-stats-literacy-are-the-answers-to-a-post-truth-age

The RSS site is worth exploring further, especially the Resources section, where the section “for journalists” could be equally useful for students: it includes exercises, presentations etc.
https://www.statslife.org.uk/

Hazel’s comment:
And, of course, the RSS site is also useful for anyone who wants to learn even a little about how statistics can be manipulated.
Remember the Whiskas advert? 8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas?
WRONG 8 out of 10 cat owners who thought their cats preferred a specific food said that their animals preferred Whiskas. Not the same thing at all.

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10 topics of interest to me and, maybe, you. WARNING: don't link to the frog story if you have a phobia

5 Topics That Are "Forbidden" to Science
via Big Think by Paul Ratner

The recent changes in Washington do not seem to bode well for fact-driven, scientific points of view on many issues. But there are already a number of sensitive areas of science where important research is stalling due to outside pressures or serious questions asked by the scientists themselves.
A yearly conference organized by the MIT Media Lab tackles “forbidden research”, the science that is constrained by ethical, cultural and institutional restrictions. The purpose of the conference is to give scientists a forum to consider these ideas and questions and to discuss the viability and necessity of studying topics like the rights of AI and machines, genetic engineering, climate change and others.
Edward Snowden, who appeared remotely at the 2016 conference, summarized its “theme” as “law is no substitute for conscience”. Pointing to his work against pervasive digital surveillance, he reiterated that “the legality of a thing is quite distinct from the morality of it”.
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Genghis Khan: Could satellites help find his tomb?
via BBC News by Zoe Kleinman (Technology of Business reporter)

Genghis Khan was a great warrior, but where was he buried?
An 800-year-old puzzle about the burial place of Mongolian ruler Genghis Khan sparked a very 21st Century business.
Albert Lin was on an expedition to locate the lost tomb of the Mongol Empire founder, when satellite imagery firm DigitalGlobe donated some photos of potential areas for his team to scrutinise.
These images, taken from space, were enormous, and as nobody knows what the tomb actually looked like, there was no obvious place to start the search.
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Frog saliva is even stranger than scientists expected
via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Frog tongue mechanism has been well-documented, but only recently have scientists started looking at the remarkable combo of tongue softness and frog spit's chemical makeup.
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The world has entered a new Cold War – what went wrong?
via The New Statesman by John Thornhill
Peter Conradi’s Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War traces the accumulation of distrust between the West and Russia.
In March 1992 an alarmist “secret” memo written by Richard Nixon found its way on to the front page of the New York Times. “The hot-button issue of the 1950s was, ‘Who lost China?’ If Yeltsin goes down, the question ‘Who lost Russia?’ will be an infinitely more devastating issue in the 1990s,” the former US president wrote.
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The history of global health organizations [timeline]
via OUP Blog by Chelsea Clinton and Devi Sridhar

Established in April 1948, the World Health Organization remains the leading agency concerned with international public health. As a division of the United Nations, the WHO works closely with governments to work towards combating infectious diseases and ensuring preventative care for all nations. The events included in the timeline below, sourced from Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?, show the development of global health organizations throughout history.
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5 Ingenious Inventions to Help Animals Survive Man-Made Eco Harm
via Big Think by Robby Berman

Scientists have been stealing ideas from animals for years. The Shinkansen Bullet Train in Japan for example, was super-fast — 200 mph. But it was also super-noisy until chief engineer and bird-watcher Eiji Nakatsu got the idea that the beak that allows kingfishers to splash-lessly dive into water could also help a train slice more easily through air. One industrial “nose job” later, the bullet train is far quieter and goes 10% faster on 15% less fuel.
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"Room for Millions of Immigrants" – railroad pamphlet from 1883 shows how American life has changed
via AbeBooks.com by Richard Davies

A scarce 1883 pamphlet promoting California as a destination for immigrants has been listed for sale on AbeBooks.com. It show how immigrants were once courted in the US.
“California, the Cornucopia of the World” was written by I.N. Hoag for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and was distributed to immigrants who had already reached the East Coast of the United States.
The front cover boldly proclaims “Room for Millions of Immigrants. 43,795,000 Acres of Government Lands Untaken. Railroad & Private Land for a Million Farmers. A Climate for Health & Wealth Without Cyclones or Blizzards.”
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Curzon’s curios
via The National Archives Blog by Dr Richard Dunley
As part of The National Archives’ commemoration of the centenary of the First World War we have been running a project to catalogue some of the private correspondence of key British diplomats of the period.
These collections, held in record series FO 800, are a gold mine for researchers interested in British foreign policy, offering the personal and private views of leading figures, which often present a very different picture to that in the official Foreign Office records. They also contain many extraordinary stories which have until recently remained hidden. In a previous blog I highlighted one of these, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s penchant for pyjamas!
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Life forms that could be 50,000 years old found in caves in Mexico
The bizarre, ancient microbes and viruses found living in crystals in extremely punishing conditions deep in an abandoned lead and zinc mine
via the Guardian by Associated Press

Crystals in a Mexican cave where scientists discovered microbes that could be 50,000 years old. Photograph: Penny Boston/AP
In a Mexican cave system so beautiful and hot that it is called both fairyland and hell, scientists have discovered life trapped in crystals that could be 50,000 years old.
The bizarre and ancient microbes were found dormant in caves in Naica, in Mexico’s northern Chihuahua state, and were able to exist by living on minerals such as iron and manganese, said Penelope Boston, head of Nasa’s Astrobiology Institute.
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Amazing balloon-powered pipe organ made of paper and cardboard
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

Papercraft master Aliaksei Zholner made this exquisite pipe organ entirely from paper products. Here are his build notes, written in Russian.
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10 more interesting stories starting with a library (where else?)

A library in letters: the Bodleian
via OUP Blog by Amelia Carruthers

“Oxford University, Radcliffe Camera, a Reading room of Bodleian library” by Tejvan Pettinger, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Libraries by their very nature are keepers and extollers of the written word. They contain books, letters, and manuscripts, signifying unending possibilities and limitless stores of knowledge waiting to be explored. But aside from the texts and stories kept within libraries’ walls, they also have a long and fascinating story in their own right. In light of this contrast between the physical store of narratives, and the generally hidden life and narrative(s) of the library itself – what can letters about libraries tell us about the ways these spaces are used, and what makes them so special?
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7 adorably wrong retro visions of the future
via The New Statesman by Amelia Tate
Ah, the future. The golden, glorious future. A time when food will be replaced by pills, walking will be replaced by hovering, and someone will have finally invented a printer that will print your black and white theatre ticket even though (even though!) you have an empty magenta ink cartridge. Who can wait?
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Art history & the brain
via Arts & Letters Daily: Christie Davies in The New Criterion 35:10 June 2017

Paintings of the Chauvet-Pont-dâ Arc Cave
John Onians is one of Europe’s most innovative and wide-ranging art historians. A classicist by training and an expert on the theory and practice of Renaissance architecture, he became the pioneer of the teaching of World Art in British universities.
In European Art: A Neuroarthistory, his latest, expertly illustrated work, Onians has applied his ideas about how the workings of the brain relate to artistic expression to the entire spectrum of European art – from the very earliest cave paintings to Malevitch and Le Corbusier. The religious art of medieval Europe, including Gothic architecture, the works of Italian Renaissance, and the achievements of Velázquez, Canaletto, and Constable are all analysed in detail; here, though, I will specifically consider three of his topics.
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The many voices of Dickens
via OUP Blog by Melisa Klimaszewski

Title page from the first edition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, 1843.
Illustration by John Leech, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Charles Dickens’s reputation as a novelist and as the creator of Ebenezer Scrooge, one of the most globally recognized Christmas miser figures, has secured him what looks to be a permanent place in the established literary canon. Students, scholars, and fans of Dickens may be surprised to learn that the voice many Victorians knew as “Dickens,” especially at Christmastime, was also the voice of nearly forty other people. Over an eighteen-year span at the height of his career, Dickens was a collaborator whose creative voice was in conversation with a host of others.
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Merchant Navy shipwrecks in the First World War
via The National Archives blog by Dr George Hay and Janet Dempsey
Battles and diplomacy naturally tend to dominate the narrative of the First World War, but little of either would have been sustained for long without the logistical efforts of the Merchant Navy. For the British this contribution was critical – not just delivering the means to fight to the operational theatres, but underpinning the entire war effort with sustenance and raw materials.
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'People wanted to meet me and the donkey': my role in a bestselling children's book
Susanne Schäfer-Limmer recalls finding a donkey on Rhodes, and how her father turned the story into a simple tale
via the Guardian by Candice Pires

Susanne Schäfer-Limmer with Benjamin the donkey.
Photograph: Lennart Osbeck/Scribe Publications
I grew up in a village on the Greek island of Rhodes. My parents moved there from just outside Cologne in 1966, when I was a year old. They had wanted a more simple life, and they had been to Greece a few times and fallen in love with the Mediterranean light and Greek hospitality. Our house had no running water and only a little electricity, but we lived by the sea and it was beautiful.
One day, when I was two, we found a young donkey in the village. It had probably been abandoned by someone who couldn’t afford to keep it. We christened it Benjamin. I don’t know whose idea it was, but my father, Hans Limmer, and a Swedish friend of his in our village, Lennart Osbeck, thought it would be fun to make a children’s book about it – neither of them had written one before.
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The Monk Who Saves Manuscripts From ISIS
Why a Christian wants to rescue Islamic artifacts
via Library Link: Matteo Fagotto in The Atlantic

Rescuing the world’s most precious antiquities from destruction is a painstaking project – and a Benedictine monk may seem like an unlikely person to lead the charge. But Father Columba Stewart is determined. Soft-spoken, dressed in flowing black robes, this 59-year-old American has spent the past 13 years roaming from the Balkans to the Middle East in an effort to save Christian and Islamic manuscripts threatened by wars, theft, weather – and, lately, the Islamic State.
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These vibrant arrangements of diatoms revive a lost Victorian art
via Boing Boing by Andrea James

Matthew Killip directed this lovely short film about Klaus Kemp, a microscopist whose specialty had its heyday in Victorian times: arranging microscopic creatures into beautiful patterns.
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Collection of Eastern Sephardic Ballads Goes Online
via Research Buzz Firehose: Dr. Rina Benmayor, Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington
The Benmayor Collection of Eastern Sephardic Ballads and Other Lore is a collection of over 140 audio recordings gathered by Dr. Rina Benmayor in Seattle and Los Angeles during the 1970s. In conjunction with her visit to the University of Washington in 2014, and working together with the Sephardic Studies Program and Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, Dr. Benmayor organized, catalogued, and digitized her recordings and kindly contributed them to the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection.
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Extraordinary migration of giant Amazon catfish revealed
via the Guardian by Damian Carrington

The dorado catfish, sometimes called the gilded catfish due to its silver and gold skin, can grow up to 2 metres in length. Photograph: Michael Goulding/WCS
A giant silvery-gold catfish undertakes the longest freshwater migration of any fish, according to new research, travelling 11,600km from the Andes to the mouth of the Amazon and back.
The dorado catfish, which can grow up to 2 metres long, is an important source of food for people along the world’s longest river. It was suspected of making a spectacular journey, but a careful new analysis of the distribution of larvae and juvenile and mature adults has confirmed the mammoth migration.
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Perceptions of discrimination and distributive injustice among people with physical disabilities: In jobs, compensation and career development

an article by Mercedes Villanueva-Flores (Cadiz University, Spain) and Ramon Valle and Mar Bornay-Barrachina (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain) published in Personnel Review Volume 46 Issue 3 (2017)

Abstract

Purpose
This study examines whether disabled workers perceive negative workplace experiences in terms of discrimination. The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of perceived distributive injustice at work, regarding three dimensions – job assignment, compensation and career development opportunities – on perceived discrimination and explore the mediation role of perceived discrimination in the relationship between perceived distributive injustice and the job dissatisfaction.

Design/methodology/approach
Research hypotheses are tested with a questionnaire administered to 107 disabled employees working in public and private Spanish organisations.

Findings
The results indicate that physically disabled people perceive distributive injustice and discrimination at work regarding job assignment, compensation and career development opportunities in Andalusian organisations, and this perception of discrimination leads to feel dissatisfaction. This study confirms the triple dimensionality of two of the variables studied: perceived distributive injustice at work and perceived discrimination at work.

Originality/value
Few studies have focussed on disability-related issues from a human resource management viewpoint. This study focusses on job assignments, compensation and career development and shows that the perception of discrimination mediates the relation between the perception of distributive injustice at work, and job dissatisfaction. That is, perceived distributive injustice in the organisation leads physically disabled employees to compare their situation with that of their non-disabled peers and thus to perceive discrimination regarding job assignment, compensation and career development opportunities. As a result, they become dissatisfied with their jobs. The results obtained allow us to extend the organisational justice framework, achieving a more thorough understanding of the perception of both injustice and discrimination.

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Only 1 in 4 people with a long-term mental illness are in work, says TUC

TUC press release 18 May 2017

Only 1 in 4 (26.2%) people with a mental illness or phobia lasting for 12 months or more are in work, according to a report published by the TUC to coincide with its Disabled Workers’ Conference today.

The report, Mental health and employment, contains new analysis of official employment statistics, which finds that while 4 in 5 (80.4%) non-disabled people are in work, people with mental illness, anxiety or depression have substantially lower employment rates:

• Only 1 in 4 (26.2%) people with a mental illness lasting (or expected to last) more than a year are in work.
• Less than half (45.5%) of people with depression or anxiety lasting more than 12 months are in work.

The TUC is concerned that this suggests employers are failing to make adequate changes in the workplace to enable people with mental illnesses, anxiety or depression to get a job, or stay in work. Mental health problems can often be 'invisible' to others, so a lack of mental health awareness amongst managers and employers is also likely to be a factor.

The employment rate for disabled people is increasing, but too slowly for the government to reach its target of halving the disability employment gap by 2020. The TUC estimates it will take until 2025 for those classified in official figures as having long-term depression and anxiety, and until 2029 for people classified as having long-term mental illness.

TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said: “It’s simply not good enough that so few people with long-term mental health problems are able to stay in work.
“Not only is the economy missing out on the skills and talents these workers have, but having to leave your job can worsen your mental health.
“The next government and employers must do more to support people with mental health conditions. Simple steps like giving an employee paid time off to go to counselling appointments can make a huge difference.
“All over the country, union reps are helping working people who have mental health conditions. They help with getting bosses to make reasonable adjustments, so that people can stay in work. And they negotiate better support from employers for workers who become ill or disabled. It’s one of the many reasons why everyone should get together with their workmates and join a union.”

The TUC report Mental health and employment is available here

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10 interesting things from human sacrifice, via Vermeer to regret

Researchers Discover a New Reason Why Ancient Societies Practiced Human Sacrifice
via Big Think by Philip Perry

An Aztec human sacrifice. By: ignote, from a 16th century codex [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Human sacrifice is today a part of urban legends or the serial murders of a few, craven madmen. But dig deeper into history and you’ll find that it was a part of many societies and took place in most regions around the world. These include the South Pacific, ancient Japan, early Southeast Asian societies, ancient Europe, certain Native American cultures, in Mesoamerica, and among the great civilizations of the ancient world. Babylon, Egypt, China, Greece, and even the precursor to the Romans, all took part in ritualized killings. In ancient Egypt and China, for instance, slaves were often buried alive, along with the body of their sovereign, to serve him in the afterlife.
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How Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth in 200 BC
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
High school teacher Joe Howard made another excellent math video. This time, he shows how Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth in 200 BC.
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Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting review – the birth of the cool
via the Guardian by Jonathan Jones

Thinking of a world beyond... Detail from Johannes Vermeer’s Woman with Lute, 1663. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Some artists are so dazzling they reduce all around them to greyness. Their genius is a flame for us moths who queue for hours to see any exhibition with their name on it. Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, which opens this week at the Louvre, was already jam-packed when I went to see it and that was two days before the general public was allowed in. No wonder. This is a unique chance to see some of Vermeer’s most stupendous masterpieces in one place – about a third of his entire surviving output, including such glories as The Milkmaid (c.1660), lent by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Woman Holding A Balance (c.1664) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the marvellous Woman with a Lute (c.1662-63) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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I wanted to go, I really wanted to but travel costs on top of entrance fee were simply out of scope of my budget.

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Card catalogs had their own elegant standardized handwriting
via Boing Boing by Andrea James

Behold Library Hand, a font designed specifically for librarians without typewriters who created cards for card catalogs. What’s cool is the variation within the guidelines:
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I knew I had seen this elsewhere, I did not expect it to turn up so neatly after six months or so.

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Library Hand, the Fastidiously Neat Penmanship Style Made for Card Catalogs
via Library Link: Ella Morton at Atlas Obscura

In September 1885, a bunch of librarians spent four days holed up in scenic Lake George, just over 200 miles north of New York City. In the presence of such library-world luminaries as Melvil Dewey – the well-organized chap whose Dewey Decimal System keeps shelves orderly to this day – they discussed a range of issues, from the significance of the term “bookworm” to the question of whether libraries ought to have a separate reference-room for ladies.
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A robot that walks like an ostrich designed to “be the standard for legged autonomy”
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Cassie is a two-legged robot that walks like an ostrich. It was developed by Agility Robotics.
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The great mathematician Abraham A. Fraenkel remembers the challenges he and his Jewish colleagues faced under the slow rise of the Nazis
via 3 Quarks Daily: Abraham A. Fraenkel in Tablet
My report about this last phase of my life in Germany should not close without my describing some people who in every respect deserve to be highlighted. Those who first come to mind are eight scientists. Of course, I cannot and do not wish to offer biographies or acknowledgments of their scientific accomplishments that can be easily found elsewhere. Instead, I will mention primarily those aspects that were significant for my own development. Of these eight men, there are four mathematicians: Hilbert, Brouwer, Landau, and von Neumann; two physicists: Einstein and Niels Bohr; and two Protestant theologians and philosophers: Rudolf Otto and Heinrich Scholz.
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Preserving the history of Syriac Christianity in the Middle East
via Research Buzz: Ann Marie Deer Owens in Vanderbilt University Research News

St. Thomas Cross is a symbol of that shared heritage among the many Syriac denominations in India. (Submitted image)
An international collaboration that includes a Vanderbilt University Divinity scholar has published three new online reference works to help preserve Syriac, a Middle Eastern language and culture on the edge of extinction.
The Syriac language is a dialect of Aramaic used extensively by Christians in the Middle East.
“For more than a thousand years, Syriac was one of the most widely used languages in the ancient and medieval culture,” said David A. Michelson, assistant professor of the history of Christianity at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He is also an affiliate assistant professor of classical and Mediterranean studies in the College of Arts and Science. “Syriac culture is very important for understanding key moments in the development and intersection of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.”
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Family feuds, war and bloodshed – England’s medieval Game of Thrones
Research shows how an 800-year-old conflict known as the Anarchy still marks England’s landscape
via the Guardian by Robin McKie

Gemma Whelan and Alfie Allen as Yara and Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones.
Photograph: Helen Sloan/2016 HBO
England’s first civil war raged for almost 20 years – and outdid Game of Thrones for violence and treachery. Indeed, the 12th-century conflict was so intense it changed the landscape of the nation for decades, according to newly published archaeological research.
Fortified villages and churches appeared across the country. Rivals to the king’s mints made coins in different territories. And a network of castles – to hold back rebels – was constructed.
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What do you most regret? People age 5 to 75 answer
via Boing Boing by Andrea James

Glamour Magazine has an interesting series where they ask a question of 70 people each representing an age from 5 to 75. The responses, presented in order by age, have a fascinating cumulative effect.
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10 more interesting stories for you to enjoy

Did these toy building blocks inspire young Einstein’s imagination?
via AbeBooks.com by Richard Davies

Albert Einstein’s toy building blocks
Albert Einstein’s much-loved childhood building blocks have been listed for sale on AbeBooks.com.
Housed in two wooden boxes, the set features approximately 160 pieces with some chipped from use. Did these humble toy building blocks nurture the imagination of the boy who would become the world’s greatest physicist? It’s inspiring to think that these simple blocks were indeed the starting point for Einstein.
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The Eye of the Beholder
How Rorschach’s inkblots turned personality testing into an art.
via Arts & Letters Daily: Merve Emry in New Republic

Just after April Fools’ Day in 1922, Hermann Rorschach, a psychologist who used a collection of symmetrical inkblots to treat patients with manic depression and schizophrenia, died of appendicitis in Herisau, Switzerland, at the age of 37. Had he lived, he would have been 40 when his inkblots made landfall in the United States in 1925; 55 when they emerged as a helpful tool for profiling college applicants; 62 when the Pentagon used them to fashion a line of tropical shorts for World War II veterans; and 99 when Andy Warhol poured paint onto a canvas in 1984, folded it in half, and opened it to reveal his first inkblot-inspired painting. Rorschach would have been 121 – unlikely, but not impossible – when Gnarls Barkley released his 2006 music video for “Crazy,” which featured a series of liquefied inkblots that morphed into threatening or reassuring shapes, depending on one’s perspective. And he most certainly would have been dead by 2016, when the film Arrival imagined a world in which aliens could communicate with humans by means of a visual language written in a mysterious, inky pattern.
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Chart of every Nokia dumbphone from 1982-2006
via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Prepare to take a technological trip down memory lane with this enormous comprehensive chart of every Nokia dumbphone model starting 35 years ago. Extendable antennas, clamshells, you name it.
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Iron Age Potters Carefully Recorded Earth’s Magnetic Field – By Accident
via 3 Quarks Daily: Rae Ellen Bichell at NPR

Ancient jar handles like this one, stamped with a royal seal, provide a detailed timeline of the Earth's magnetic field thousands of years ago.

Image courtesy of Oded Lipschits
About 3,000 years ago, a potter near Jerusalem made a big jar. It was meant to hold olive oil or wine or something else valuable enough to send to the king as a tax payment. The jar’s handles were stamped with a royal seal, and the pot went into the kiln.
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Dance of Steel
via Arts & Letters Daily: Simon Morrison in the Paris Review
In Soviet Russia, getting a ballet off the ground was no mean feat, as Sergei Prokofiev learned the hard way.

LÉONIDE MASSINE WIELDS A LARGE HAMMER OVER THE HEAD OF ALEXANDRA DANILOVA DURING A PRODUCTION OF PROKOFIEV’S LE PAS D’ACIER IN LONDON.
In Russia, during the Soviet era, government control made the challenge of getting a ballet onto the stage no less onerous than being admitted into the ballet schools of Moscow or Leningrad. The daunting auditions of Soviet legend – teachers scrutinizing preadolescents for the slightest physical imperfection – found an ideological parallel in the required inspections by censorship boards at the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky-Kirov theaters. First, the subject of a prospective ballet was adjudicated in terms of its fulfillment of the demands for people-mindedness; the music and the dance would be likewise assessed. There would follow a provisional closed-door run-through to decide if the completed ballet could be presented to the public, after which it would either be scrapped or sent back to the creative workshop for repairs. Dress rehearsals were subsequently assessed by administrators, cognoscenti, politicians, representatives from agricultural and industrial unions, and relatives of the performers. Even then, after all of the technical kinks had been worked out, an ideological defect could lead to the sudden collapse of the entire project.
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Robotic drone bee pollinates flowers
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

Japanese researchers demonstrated how a tiny remote-controlled drone could help bees pollinate flowers in areas where bees populations have been reduced due to pesticides, climate change, and other factors. Eijiro Myako and his colleagues at the Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology hope that eventually robotic bees could handle their share of the work autonomously.
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Was Chaucer really a “writer”?
via OUP Blog by Christopher Cannon

We know more about Geoffrey Chaucer’s life than we do about most medieval writers. Despite this, it’s a truism of Chaucer biography that the records that survive never once describe him as a poet. Less often noticed, however, are the two radically different views of Chaucer as an author we find in roughly contemporaneous portraiture, although the portraits in which we find them are themselves well known.
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Jerusalem Syndrome at the Met
An exhibition on the diverse multiculturalism of medieval Jerusalem has been ecstatically received. There’s just one problem: the vision of history it promotes is a myth.
via Arts & Letters Daily: Edward Rothstein in Mosaic

From an illustration in a Syriac Christian lectionary. 1220, tempera, ink, and gold on paper. Metropolitan Museum of Art/British Library.“Severe, Jerusalem-generated mental problems.” Such, as characterized by the British Journal of Psychiatry, is the pathological derangement known as Jerusalem Syndrome. The madness is generally attributed to the city’s intoxicating spiritual powers, recognized over the centuries to inspire wild prophecies, orotund pronouncements, and utopian fantasies sometimes accompanied by predictions of imminent apocalypse.Continue reading

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Bosch and Bruegel review – more gripping than a thriller
via the Guardian by Alexandra Harris

Everyday symbolism … detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559). Photograph: Alamy
Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder work like antagonistic muscles in the imagination, pulling with and against each other. Bosch is a painter of medieval hellfire whose fantastical creations exceed our nightmares. Bruegel, most memorably and wonderfully, shows us a recognisable world where children lick bowls clean, bagpipers draw breath and harvesters stretch out in the sun. Turning from metaphysics and from myth, he attends to the ploughman who labours his way across a field while Icarus falls into the sea far below. Bosch’s pale figures belong to the international gothic; Bruegel’s weighty peasants dance vigorously into modern times.
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Watch: David Bowie's first TV appearance at age 17 was a delightful prank
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
In November 1964, 17-year-old David Bowie (then Jones) appeared on BBC’s “Tonight” to talk about his new Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, a PR stunt cooked up by his dad.
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Self-reflection on privacy research in social networking sites

Ralf De Wolf (Vrije Universiteit, Brussel, Belgium; Ghent University, Belgium), Ellen Vanderhoven and Tammy Schellens (Ghent University, Belgium), Bettina Berendt (KU Leuven, Herverlee, Belgium) and Jo Pierson (Vrije Universiteit, Brussel) published in Behaviour & Information Technology Volume 36 Issue 5 (2017)

Abstract

The increasing popularity of social networking sites has been a source of many privacy concerns. To mitigate these concerns and empower users, different forms of educational and technological solutions have been developed.

Developing and evaluating such solutions, however, cannot be considered a neutral process. Instead, it is socially bound and interwoven with norms and values of the researchers.

In this contribution, we aim to make the research process and development of privacy solutions more transparent by highlighting questions that should be considered.
(1) Which actors are involved in formulating the privacy problem?
(2) Is privacy perceived as a human right or as a property right on one’s data?
(3) Is informing users of privacy dangers always a good thing?
(4) Do we want to influence users’ attitudes and behaviours?
(5) Who is the target audience?

We argue that these questions can help researchers to better comprehend their own perspective on privacy, that of others, and the influence of the solutions they are developing. In the discussion, we propose a procedure called ‘tool clinics’ for further practical implementations.

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Information need as trigger and driver of information seeking: a conceptual analysis

an article by Reijo Savolainen (University of Tampere, Finland) published in Aslib Journal of Information Management Volume 69 Issue 1 (2017)

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the picture of the motivators for information behaviour by examining the nature of information need as a trigger and driver of information seeking.

Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual analysis was made by focussing on the ways in which researchers have conceptualised information need in models for human information behaviour (HIB). The study draws on conceptual analysis of 26 key studies focussing on the above topic.

Findings
Researchers have employed two main approaches to conceptualise information needs in the HIB models. First, information need is approached as a root factor which motivates people to identify and access information sources. Second, information need is approached as a secondary trigger or driver determined by more fundamental factors, for example, the information requirements of task performance. The former approach conceptualises information need as a trigger providing an initial impetus to information seeking, while the latter approach also depicts information need as a driver that keeps the information-seeking process in motion. The latter approach is particularly characteristic of models depicting information seeking as a cyclic process.

Research limitations/implications
As the study focuses on information need, no attention is devoted to related constructs such as anomalous state of knowledge and uncertainty.

Originality/value
The study pioneers by providing an in-depth analysis of the nature of information need as a trigger and driver of information seeking. The findings refine the picture of motivators for information behaviour.

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10 more interesting things from my "saved for later use" file

How Europe became so rich
In a time of great powers and empires, just one region of the world experienced extraordinary economic growth. How?
via Arts & Letters Daily: Joel Mokyr in aeon

Dam Square with the New Town Hall under Construction (1656) by Johannes Lingelbach.Photo courtesy The Amsterdam Museum/Wikipedia
How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Learned tomes by historians, economists, political scientists and other scholars fill many bookshelves with explanations of how and why the process of modern economic growth or ‘the Great Enrichment’ exploded in western Europe in the 18th century. One of the oldest and most persuasive explanations is the long political fragmentation of Europe. For centuries, no ruler had ever been able to unite Europe the way the Mongols and the Mings had united China.
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How nature created consciousness – and our brains became minds
via The New Statesman by Steven Poole
In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel C Dennett investigates the evolution of consciousness.
In the preface to his new book, the ­philosopher Daniel Dennett announces proudly that what we are about to read is “the sketch, the backbone, of the best scientific theory to date of how our minds came into existence”. By the end, the reader may consider it more scribble than spine – at least as far as an account of the origins of human consciousness goes. But this is still a superb book about evolution, engineering, information and design. It ranges from neuroscience to nesting birds, from computing theory to jazz, and there is something fascinating on every page.
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Serial Killers Should Fear This Algorithm
via 3 Quarks Daily: Robert Kolker at Bloomberg
On Aug. 18, 2010, a police lieutenant in Gary, Ind., received an e-mail, the subject line of which would be right at home in the first few scenes of a David Fincher movie: “Could there be a serial killer active in the Gary area?”
It isn’t clear what the lieutenant did with that e-mail; it would be understandable if he waved it off as a prank. But the author could not have been more serious. He’d attached source material – spreadsheets created from FBI files showing that over several years the city of Gary had recorded 14 unsolved murders of women between the ages of 20 and 50. The cause of each death was the same: strangulation. Compared with statistics from around the country, he wrote, the number of similar killings in Gary was far greater than the norm. So many people dying the same way in the same city – wouldn’t that suggest that at least a few of them, maybe more, might be connected? And that the killer might still be at large?
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Ten facts about the accordion
via OUP Blog by Berit Henrickson

“Accordion playing boy in Rome” by Per Palmkvist Knudsen. CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
Whether you dub accordion music annoying or enticing, you cannot deny the instrument’s persistence. The earliest version of the accordion emerged in the early 1800’s and one can still find it on many street corners today. Certain universities, museums, and soloists have assisted in the accordion’s longevity. We’ve assembled 10 facts about the instrument that may satisfy our enduring curiosity about the instrument.
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Did Darwin’s theory of evolution encourage abolition of slavery?
via Arts & Letters Daily: Jerry A. Coyne in The Washington Post

An original copy of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” published in 1859. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
On New Year’s Day, 1860, four men sat around a dinner table in Concord, Mass., contemplating a hefty green book that had just arrived in America. Published in England barely a month before, Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was sent by the author himself to Asa Gray, a Harvard botanist who would become one of Darwin’s staunchest defenders. Gray gave his heavily annotated copy to his wife’s cousin, child-welfare activist Charles Loring Brace, who, lecturing in Concord, brought it to the home of politician Franklin Sanborn. Besides Sanborn and Brace, the distinguished company included the philosopher Bronson Alcott and the author/naturalist Henry David Thoreau.
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Guy visits the least used train stations in the UK
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Geoff Marshall is making entertaining videos of his visits to the least used rail station in each county of the UK. In this episode, Geoff takes a ride in a cute little old old heritage train at Little Kimble - the least used station in Buckinghamshire.
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Crimes without criminals
via OUP Blog by Vincenzo Ruggiero

‘business-stock-finance-market’ by 3112014. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.
There are crimes without victims and crimes without criminals. Financial crime belongs to the second type, as responsibilities for crises, crashes, bubbles, misconduct, or even fraud, are difficult to establish. The historical process that led to the disappearance of offenders from the financial sphere is fascinating.
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Lesney toys: they fit inside a matchbox
via The National Archives blog by David Gill

The motto goes that that the best things come in small packages. If this is true then it must surely be applicable to Lesney Toys, the original manufacturer of Matchbox model cars. After looking at the history of the Mettoy company (the creators of Corgi Toys), it would be unfair of me not to give the same treatment to Lesney, their distinguished rivals.
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Lost in space? A brief guide to the ‘holographic principle’ of the universe
via the Guardian by Stuart Clark

Do the maths: another step on the way to unlocking the secrets of the universe.
Photograph: Alamy
The universe is a “vast and complex” hologram, according to scientists from the University of Southampton and colleagues in Canada and Italy. But fear not. It does not mean that we are all figments of an alien overlord’s dabbling with a mega-Imax projection system.
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After a century of failing to crack an ancient script, linguists turn to machines
via 3 Quarks Daily: Mallory Locklear in The Verge

Steatite seal with humped bull, Indus Valley, Mohenjo-Daro, 2500–2000 BC.

 Photo by CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images
In 1872 a British general named Alexander Cunningham, excavating an area in what was then British-controlled northern India, came across something peculiar. Buried in some ruins, he uncovered a small, one inch by one inch square piece of what he described as smooth, black, unpolished stone engraved with strange symbols — lines, interlocking ovals, something resembling a fish — and what looked like a bull etched underneath. The general, not recognizing the symbols and finding the bull to be unlike other Indian animals, assumed the artifact wasn’t Indian at all but some misplaced foreign token. The stone, along with similar ones found over the next few years, ended up in the British Museum. In the 1920s many more of these artifacts, by then known as seals, were found and identified as evidence of a 4,000-year-old culture now known as the Indus Valley Civilization, the oldest known Indian civilization to date.
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Stunning 23-foot wall chart of human history from 1881
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

Sebastian C. Adams's Synchronological Chart from the late 19th century presents 5,885 years of history (4004 BCE - 1881 AD) on a magnificent 27 inch x 23 foot illustrated and annotated timeline. What a stunner. You can zoom and pan through the whole thing at the David Rumsey Map Collection or order a scaled-down print.
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Private schooling and labour market outcomes

an article by Francis Green and Golo Henseke (University College London, UK) and Anna Vignoles (University of Cambridge, UK) published in British Educational Research Journal Volume 43 Number 1 (February 2017)

Abstract

Though a relative small part of the school sector, private schools have an important role in British society, and there are policy concerns about their negative effect on social mobility. Other studies show that individuals who have attended a private school go on to have higher levels of educational achievement, are more likely to secure a high-status occupation and also have higher wages.

In this article we contribute new evidence on the magnitude of the wage premium, and address a puzzle found in previous studies: how to explain the direct pay premium whereby privately educated male workers have higher wages even than their similarly educated peers. It is commonly conjectured that the broader curriculum that private schools are able to deliver, coupled with the peer pressures of a partially segregated section of society, help to inculcate cultural capital, including some key ‘non-cognitive’ attributes.

We focus here on leadership, organisational participation and an acceptance of hard work. We find that privately educated workers are in jobs that require significantly greater leadership skills, offer greater organisational participation and require greater work intensity. These associations are partially mediated by educational achievement.

Collectively these factors contribute little, however, to explaining the direct pay premium. Rather, a more promising account arises from the finding that inclusion of a variable for industry reduces the private school premium to an insignificant amount, which is consistent with selective sorting of privately educated workers into high-paying industries.

Full text (PDF)

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New report shows digital skills are required in all types of jobs

via Val Skelton (InformationToday Europe)

The European Commission has just published the final report of the study “ICT for Work: Digital Skills in the Workplace” on the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the transformation of jobs and skills. The evidence shows that digital technologies are used in all types of jobs, also in economic sectors not traditionally related to digitisation e.g. farming, health care, vocational training and construction.

The digital economy is transforming the way people work and the skills they need at work. This represents a major challenge for employers, workers and public authorities. The study presents data and policy recommendations that could support the transformation of the labour market into opportunities for all.

Main findings

• Digital technologies are widely used in workplaces in the European Union. 93% of European workplaces use desktop computers, 94% use broadband technology to access the internet, 75% use portable computers and 63% other portable devices. 22% use intranet platform, 8% automated machine or tools or 5% programmable robots. Larger workplaces report a higher use of digital technologies than smaller ones.
• Most jobs require basic digital skills. Basic digital skills include being able to communicate via email or social media, to create and edit documents digital documents and to search for information, or to protect personal information online. 98% of workplaces require managers and 90% that professionals (e.g. engineers, doctors and nurses, teachers, accountants, software developers, lawyers and journalists), technicians, clerical workers or skilled agricultural workers should have at least basic digital skills. 80% of workplaces require basic digital skills for sales workers. Workplaces also often require basic digital skills for building workers (50% of workplaces), plant machine operators (34%) and even employees in elementary occupations (27%). However, there are still some workplaces that do not consider digital skills to be important for some occupations e.g. craft workers, waiters and cooks.
• Technicians, professionals (both 50%) and managers (30%) are required to have specialist digital skills, especially in larger workplaces.
• The use of ICT has increased significantly in the last five years in more than 90% of workplaces. Micro-sized workplaces are more likely to report limited increase compared to bigger ones.
• Over the last five years, investments in ICT to improve efficiency or business volume increased These investments are more frequent in sectors with traditionally low levels of digital intensity, e.g. agriculture, manufacturing or construction.
• 38% of workplaces report that the lack of digital skills has an impact on their performance. Loss of productivity (46%) and decrease in the number of customers (43%) are the main negative impacts.
• 15% of workplaces report employees lack digital skills. Digital skills gaps are more likely to be found in high- and medium skilled than in low-skilled jobs.
• 88% of workplaces have not taken any action to tackle the lack of digital skills of their employees. Training is the most common action undertaken. High costs seem to be the main barrier encountered when undertaking actions to deal with digital skills gaps.

Recommendations

Apart from analysing digital skills in the workplace the study lists a number of recommendations that have been formulated in consultation with experts and stakeholders.

1. Raise awareness on digital technologies and the need for digital skills to support and improve business performance, productivity and internal organisation, and of the need for digital skills in relation to new digital technologies.
2. Promote access to digital technologies, particularly for micro and small sized companies. Loans, grants and other mechanisms should be used to enhance and support access to digital technologies.
3. Expand the availability of digital skills through the education and training system. Programmes at all levels and sectors of education should be updated and digital skills should be part of the core competences required at every level.
4. Promote access to training to employers through their professional or sectoral organisations and associations, or through governmental channels.
5. Build multi-stakeholder partnerships and agree on a digital skills strategy.
6. Consider diversity and avoid the ‘one-size fits all’ approach in the strategy
7. Include digital skills in a wider skills strategy in which other transversal skills relevant to employers such as soft skills and communication skills are included.
8. Provide access to funding for digital technologies and digital skills development
9. Reduce the digital divide, focusing in particular on the categories of individuals who do not possess digital skills and are consequently at risk of marginalisation not only in the labour market, but also in day-to-day life, which can contribute to social and economic exclusion.

Background

This final report complements the intermediate report of this study “The impact of ICT on job quality: evidence from 12 job profiles” published last year, and presents mostly findings from the ‘European Digital Skills Survey’, carried out among a representative sample of 7,800 workplaces which are statistically representative of 13,803,113 workplaces in the whole European Union (EU28) in 12 economic sectors with different levels of digital intensity. These workplaces employ a total of 150,563,540 employees in different job roles.

Further information

ICT for work: Digital skills in the workplace

Intermediate report “The impact of ICT on job quality: evidence from 12 job profiles”

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