Posts by linger
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Up Front: Why a Woman is Like a Bicycle, in reply to Moz,
managed to avoid twitter
cf. Ben Goldacre's graph representing the "bell-end distribution" of online comments (i.e., overrepresenting extreme reactions, & especially at the negative end of the bell-curve of opinion)
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to linger,
Another episode of Rich Hall's irregular updates on Trump has just become available for download (this one looking back at his first year in office).
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Hard News: Friday Music: Bar None, and…, in reply to TracyMac,
Also influenced-by, to the point of using his actual equipment: the Pet Shop Boys’ So Hard. It’s probably true to say Giorgio’s main contribution over the last 25 years has been his influence on other musicians, but that in itself is no small thing.
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to John Farrell,
FFS.
The “Don’t Eat on a Plane” story came from Bloomberg, and is based on the quack beliefs of Melissa Biggs Bradley, who “founded luxury travel firm Indagare” (we are told, as if it is relevant), but who appears to have no medical or dietary expertise whatsoever."I eat nothing on flights. I’ve talked to a lot of stewardesses about it, and it’s a stewardess secret,” she said.
”Basically, at superhigh altitude, your digestive system shuts down completely. Someone said to me it’s like being under anesthesia.”Other more responsible news sources debunked this nonsense months ago, e.g. Insider, on 24th July:
nutritionists […] say that this claim is completely false. In fact, […] this sort of fasting on a flight could actually make your blood sugar plummet and worsen the effects of jet lag.
“[The] suggestion that your digestive system shuts down during a flight has no scientific foundation,” [says] Carolyn Pallister, registered dietitian and Public Health manager at Slimming World. “By […] not eating for long periods of time on a long flight you are likely to feel weak, shaky, and could even suffer from headaches and low mood.”
Nutritionist Jennifer Cassetta agrees and called the advice “irresponsible.” She also politely reminded INSIDER that people use bathrooms on-board a plane: “that means your digestive system is up and running." -
Hard News: Is the Ministry of Health…, in reply to Frank Christian,
and…?
Compounds that are identical in chemical composition often have very different biochemistry – because they differ in shape and in charge distribution, which are more important than chemical identity as far as cell receptors are concerned. -
Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to mark taslov,
Choosing personal name reference for females vs. family name reference for males is partly a direct signal of gender power difference. But it’s more complicated than that, and not just a biased conscious choice of name. Part of it can be explained by gender bias in the reasons for achieving fame before involvement in a scandal (essentially, power vs attractiveness), and in the ease of achieving fame (so there are more famous men than famous women competing for namespace), and in the patriarchal family name convention in English (making personal names systematically more ambiguous for male referents and family names systematically more ambiguous for female referents). Of course, those biases show the same social dynamic at work.
Though tbh there really was no other viable name for Weinergate, eh.
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Hard News: Music: 2017 – this is not a list, in reply to Alan Perrott,
less a listing, more a listening
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I agree with the comments above that the term has been much overblown. I suggest instead that the political discourse has been hijacked by Jacindamaniamania.
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Other than the original serious issue raised -- that much of the research for which access is being charged is publicly-funded and therefore should be made available without the publishers' price-gouging profit margin -- the basic issue exposed in the cross-university comparison is the lack of transparency in how institutional access rates are decided. If (some) publishers are offering a relatively flat per-institution access rate that doesn't vary strongly with the absolute number of users, that would be expected to benefit larger university researcher populations, e.g. Auckland, and penalise smaller populations, e.g. Canterbury, when comparisons are made on a cost per research staff member basis.
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to Mark C. Wilson,
One bullet point (the claim that Canterbury is being charged a higher rate for access than other universities) doesn't seem explicitly supported by any part of the data summary; presumably that finding is based on a comparison of costs for matched titles, rather than the overall cost figure?