Interesting Links for 19-09-2013

[andrewducker]

• France to ban child beauty pageants
  (tags: children france beauty )
• Grand Theft Auto V: game’s dig at Edinburgh trams
  (tags: trams games edinburgh gta )
• Grand Theft Auto Vmakes $800 Million in one day.
  (tags: money gta )
• The truth about socks
  (tags: comic funny socks )
• Google's New Project to Solve Death
  (tags: google death LifeExpectancy )

Comments

[steer]

Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Apparently, You Can Make Beer In Your Gut

Is anyone else wondering where the CO2 goes? My fermenting brew bucket has the lid swollen up with the pressure after just a day.

[andrewducker]

I can imagine two directions it could go :->

[steer]

Heh... well yes... but surely someone would notice that. (But I guess he is only brewing (say) 6 pints worth not a few gallons.)

[steer]

Re: Myers-briggs:
“if you retake the test after only a five-week gap, there's around a 50% chance that you will fall into a different personality category.”

Chance would be 6.25% if it measured nothing consistent between tests. 50% in sixteen categories actually seems very high to me.

[andrewducker]

It's reasonably high - clearly it's not _meaningless_ - it's just not as accurate as they claim.

(If it was meaningless then it wouldn't have the correlations with the Big Five which it does)

[steer]

Not sure what accuracy they claim.

I'm reasonably happy it is measuring something consistent across people -- but nothing bimodal on any axis... that is people don't split into (say) introvert/extrovert but have some distribution which sits a lot of people near the middle.

It may be that it is measuring not exactly perfect things but I understand it actually correlates pretty well with other similar scales.

If people see it as fitting you into one of sixteen boxes then it's going to be a disappointment.

[gwendally]

Personally, I have found it useful just to look at the really strong traits. For example, I am really in the middle on the N/S axis, either an ENTJ or an ESTJ depending on what skillset I need to bring to bear

MBTI

[gwendally]

I agree that MBTI is pseudo science. But here's the thing: it's useful

Re: MBTI

[andrewducker]

I agree that it's a good conversation starter, and gives people language for discussing differences.

The Big Five has more of a scientific background, and is worth taking a look at. The MB types map somewhat onto them too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Big_Five

Extroversion results were moderately high which suggests you are, at times, overly talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting at the expense of developing your own individual interests and internally based identity

Re: MBTI

[gwendally]

Is this related in any way to the DISC method? Because I'm being trained on that starting next month as part of a training program on how to be a decent supervisor.

I'm fine with abandoning MBTI if I don't have to abandon somewhat hard-won knowledge; my Human Resources toolkit is really small and I hate to lose what little help I've had.

Re: MBTI

[andrewducker]

Big Five is a grouping that's been consistently replicated by psyhcology researchers. It has actual scientific backing.

Whereas DiSC is run by a company, and I'm not aware of any independent verification that it's actually valid/useful. Some good stuff here:
http://www.ere.net/2008/12/10/dissecting-the-disc/
and
http://hr.toolbox.com/blogs/ira-wolfe/why-disc-doesnt-work-for-employee-screening-49119

And don't throw away your hard-won experience! If you've found something that seems to work for you then just keep refining it and making it work better.

[bart_calendar]

The beer story made my dad when I saw it this morning.

[andrewducker]

I'm amazed you aren't already trying to infect yourself!

[bart_calendar]

Just came back from the pub where seven of us were trying to figure out how to contact the guy and ask him exactly what brewing formula he used to cause this to happen.

[del_c]

Throwing temporarily-poor people out of their houses because they don't deserve more room isn't an accidental side-effect of the bedroom tax. It was designed to be a Pigovian tax to squeeze people out of spare space.

This is a big trend, and an amazingly creepy one; I heard a right-wing "think tank" on Radio 4 the other day explaining how more young people could afford homes if only those old people would sell up and move into a room in a care home.

[andrewducker]

I could see a benefit to moving people to smaller homes _if_ there was a decent supply of smaller homes to move them into. But there isn't, so all they're doing is putting people into arreers while simultaneously costing the councils extra as they have to move people into private accomodation.

[f4f3]

Don't forget the revenue stream to people who own that private accomodation. That will fund their buy-to-let deposit, and then the councils can pay their mortgage payments when they move people out of their existing homes and into smaller homes. Of course as it becomes easier to fund purchases this way, the demand for houses goes up, and housing prices as a whole go up, meaning they can only be bought by people who are already churning existing properties. First time buyers will have to stay in rented accomodation, providing additional income to private landlords who can buy more houses to let.
It's a beautiful scheme, made only slightly less efficient by the fact that there is very little council housing stock to be sold off cheaply to sitting tennants.
So if you can afford to buy two houses, the tax payer will fund you to buy another.
If you can't afford to buy a house, you can help someone else fund their next one.
Happy days.

[murasaki_1966]

That is the Australian Housing Market in a nutshell.