Interesting Links for 22-12-2011

[andrewducker]

• The Silliest Things said to a group of SF editors, writers and academics
  (tags: funny scifi epicfail )
• Building new London homes is cheaper than providing temporary housing
  (tags: building housing london )
• All publicly-funded research data should be made freely accessible says UK government
  (tags: GOVERNMENT uk research data free )
• No payouts for

Comments

[la_marquise_de_]

Because there isn't enough red tape surrounding university funding already, and *of course* the only kind of research out there is business and technology focused.
Headdesk.

[andrewducker]

There are already plenty of places that mandate using open access journals, rather than closed ones. This would be taking research that's paid for by the government and saying that it should be available to everyone, for free. I totally agree with that ethos.

[la_marquise_de_]

Certainly it needs to be accessible. What winds me up is the introduction of yet more bureaucracy (that cuts into student contact time) and the assumption that there is only one kind of research.

[andrewducker]

I'm not convinced that it's going to add much in the way of bureaucracy. The NIH in the US has a nice simple requirement - that all papers are uploaded to the PubMed library. Almost no overhead at all:
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

The assumption is annoying, certainly.

[channelpenguin]

that teacher is AWESOME!

Until I was 14 or so, anyone who didn't know me automatically called me "son". I was never the princess when the dressing up box came out. I played with bikes, knives, climbing trees and setting fire to stuff , music, judo and and later, computers and karate. Most of my friends were boys. On the rare occasions my mum put me in a dress/skirt I pretty much looked like a boy in drag [I had very short hair by 70's standards because it is *horrible* to look after]. Fortunately I was pretty oblivious as to whether anyone thought this was weird, and my parents never really subscribed to the whole boys toys/girls toys thing. I got microscopes, books, crystal growing kits, scalextrix (sp?) and toy soldiers and matchbox cars - and, yes, the odd baby/sindy doll.

I do joke that I didn't really grow up as a girl at all.

[supergee]

Konrad Lorenz, reincarnated as a dog.

[simont]

"Ducklings always travel in single file, to hide their numbers."

[andrewducker]

I like that.

[gonzo21]

Interesting recap of the eurozone crisis. I had no idea German unions had unilaterally agreed to keep wages down.

[andrewducker]

It's put them in a very good position. Because they didn't go up dramatically when the bubble happened they aren't having to come back down.

The UK, on the other hand, is saved from lowering wages because we can just inflate/devalue our way out of it.

Other Euro countries, on the other hand, not so much.

[drdoug]

saved from lowering wages

Hahahaha!

Wages in the UK went down 3.5% in the last year, and from memory they were down the year before as well, and possibly the one before that too. See e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/nov/23/uk-household-earnings-fall

Or did you mean saved from lowering nominal wages? Which is indeed an important thing - it's becoming increasingly apparent in the current eurocrisis that nominal wages are very, very hard to lower.

But that's rather different from an unqualified "wages". Inflation does matter!

[andrewducker]

That's why I said deflate... We get paid the same, but it's worth less.