Amazingly, insulting prospective employees doesn't work

Yes, it's definitely a good idea to pre-emptively insult your potential future employees and offer a mediocre salary with the added incentive of having to very hard work to earn it. Good job team !

Slow clap.

[Might it be that rather than an entire generation being at fault, the would-be employer is just an arse ?]

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-40640649

Game of Thrones : tapestry edition

So good I'll even reshare a Daily Mail link. Does not contain any spoilers from last night's episode as far as I'm aware (I haven't watched it yet, so no spoilers here either please !!!).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4700724/Game-Thrones-scenes-portrayed-77-metre-long-tapestry.html

Millenials are loyal to the point of taking a financial hit

It turns out, millennials are just as committed as their elders were at the same age, if not more so. What’s more, they’re not being rewarded for that loyalty. Members of the preceding generation, known as Generation X, were found to be twice as likely to keep switching employers at the same age – a good thing for them, financially speaking. Job-hopping tends to come with a pay rise of about 15% with each move, as well as the opportunity for workers to learn new skills and determine which kind employers are a good fit for them. Meanwhile, pay rises for those who stay with one company for the long term have dwindled to almost nothing, according to the Resolution Foundation report.

In April, the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan “fact tank” based in Washington, DC, published similar findings, drawn from US Department of Labor data. The report found that American workers aged 18 to 35 were just as likely to stick with their employers as their older counterparts in Generation X were when they were young adults. And among those with college degrees, millennials were found to have longer track records with their employers than Generation X workers did when they were the same age.

...

The fact that young people are job-hopping less, she adds, is “a big determinant of why, for the first time in living memory, young people are earning no more now than previous generations were at the same age 15 years before.”

Stereotypes about millennials suggest they’re not interested in old-fashioned markers of success. But when it comes to the fundamental desire for these basic anchors – a home, retirement savings, a decent career, a family – “there’s strikingly little difference between the generations,” Gardiner says.

Seven in 10 millennials living in mature economies, according to the 2017 Deloitte Millennial Survey, would prefer to be in full-time employment, rather than freelance work, and the reasons most often given for this preference are “job security” and a “fixed income.”

“Perspectives among young people have changed since the 1970s,” Deal says; “the world has changed.” But the lament that young people lack commitment is a “typical stereotype of young people. We saw the same stereotyping of Gen Xers when they were new to the workforce.”
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170713-why-the-millennial-stereotype-is-wrong

All the Doctors

I'm going to miss the Moffat-Capaldi era. No-one's ever going to be able to compete with Peter Capaldi in a long black coat, wearing sunglasses, sitting on a tank in a medieval castle playing an electric guitar. Can't be done, I tell ya.
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-40585673

Smaller brains can be an advantage for intelligence

"Ravens are avian dinosaurs that shared an ancestor with mammals around 320 million years ago," the Science paper notes.

The fact that corvids have brains the size of a walnut might not be a disadvantage. A study published last year revealed that though their brains are much smaller than some apes, like the capuchin monkey, the brains of corvids and large parrots have large numbers of neurons in some parts of their brains, at high density. Kabadayi said that their connection speeds might be even faster than those of mammals due to these neurons' close proximity to one another.

Perhaps the idea of problem-solving intelligence in velociraptors [no Google, I did not mean "velocipedes", get a better bloody dictionary already !] is not so outlandish after all.

In this study, researchers from Lund University in Sweden trained ravens to use a simple machine where they dropped a rock in a tube to earn a food reward. Later, they were put in a room with the puzzle box (but no rock), which was then removed. An hour later, the birds were presented with a row of objects: the rock, and several distractions. Nearly all of them chose the rock, and 86 percent managed to successfully use it to open the machine when it was presented to them 15 minutes later.

In another experiment, 78 percent of ravens were able to successfully barter with a human and exchange goods—trading a bottlecap for a reward—a higher success rate than what's been seen in similar experiments done with apes.

I phoned co-author Can Kabadayi, a doctoral student in cognitive science, over Skype to ask him about the new paper. (His profile photo featured two ravens perched on his head and shoulder.)

He described to me how one experiment took an eerie turn: One raven in the experiment figured out how to work their rock/box contraption first, then began teaching the method to other ravens, and finally invented its own way of doing it. Instead of dropping a rock to release a treat, the future Ruler of the Raven Kingdom constructed a layer of twigs in the tube, and pushed another stick down through the layer to force it open. The bird had to be removed from the experiment before it could teach any other birds how to do it.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wj8p3n/ravens-are-so-smart-one-hacked-this-researchers-experiment

Blair on Brexit

Blair says all the right things.

The election result should enable a fundamental re-appraisal of Brexit. Large numbers of people voted to stop a Hard Brexit and rejected explicitly the mandate Theresa May was demanding. Instead, both main parties remain wedded to leaving the Single Market.

I agree that if the will of the British people remains as it was last June, then Brexit will happen. But, to state what in a less surreal world would be blindingly obvious, it is possible, that, as we know more about what Brexit means, our ‘will’ changes. Our leaders should at least lead a proper debate about the options before us. They should become the nation’s educators, engaging us, explaining to us, laying out every alternative and what it means.

Rational consideration of the options would sensibly include the option of negotiating for Britain to stay within a Europe itself prepared to reform and meet us half way. There is a genuine and widespread desire for change and for the politics of social justice. This should alter the context in which we debate politics; and help influence the policy solutions.

But it doesn't alter the judgement about the risks of an unchanged Corbyn programme, if he became Prime Minister and tried to implement it at the same time as Brexit. If a right wing populist punch in the form of Brexit was followed by a left wing populist punch in the form of unreconstructed hard left economics, Britain would hit the canvas, flat on our back and be out for a long count.

In this time of accelerating change, we are offered two different types of conservativism, one of the right and one of the left. The election was fought like one from the 1980s, but with two competing visions of the 1960s. Neither answers the call of the future.

Politics today are volatile and unpredictable. In these times, best hold to what you believe. The centre may appear marginalised; but in the hearts and minds of many, it simply needs to be renewed. Brexit makes this renewal urgent.

http://institute.global/news/brexit-and-centre

Gender roles are a social construct

The full post is well worth reading.

The first hyperloop test doesn't impress me

I doubt very much this will ever become a thing, but you never know.

The step into the future occurred in May at the company’s Nevada test track, where engineers watched a magnetically levitating test sled fire through a tube in near-vacuum, reaching 70 mph in just over five seconds. That is but a fraction of the 700 mph or so Hyperloop One promises, but put that aside for now. What matters here is all the elements required to make hyperloop work, worked: propulsion, braking, and the levitation and vacuum systems that all but eliminate friction and air resistance so that pod shoots through the tube at maximum speed with minimal energy.

https://www.wired.com/story/hyperloop-one-test-success/

Lioness adopts a leopard

D'aaaaawwwww.

A baby leopard can't change his spots, but this lioness doesn't seem to mind. These beautiful pictures are the first ever taken of a wild lioness nursing a cub from a different species - an extremely rare event.The pair were spotted by Joop Van Der Linde, a guest at Ndutu Safari Lodge in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area.

The scene is the Serengeti; the attentive mother, five-year-old Nosikitok. The lioness has a GPS collar fitted by Kope Lion, a conservation NGO, and three young cubs of her own - born around the 27-28 June.

Dr Luke Hunter, President and Chief Conservation Officer for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organisation which supports Kope Lion, told the BBC the incident was "truly unique". "It's not something that I'm aware has ever happened before between large cats like this," he said. "We know there are cases where lionesses will adopt other lion cubs... But this is unprecedented. I know of no other case - between any large cat, for that matter - where the species has adopted or nursed the cub of another species."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40603065

Memes in your genes

Technology is weird.

An image and short film has been encoded in DNA, using the units of inheritance as a medium for storing information. Using a genome editing tool known as Crispr, US scientists inserted a gif - five frames of a horse galloping - into the DNA of bacteria. Then the team sequenced the bacterial DNA to retrieve the gif and the image, verifying that the microbes had indeed incorporated the data as intended.

In order to insert this information into the genomes of bacteria, the researchers transferred the image and the movie onto nucleotides (building blocks of DNA), producing a code that related to the individual pixels of each image. For the gif, sequences were delivered frame-by-frame over five days to the bacterial cells.

The data were spread across the genomes of multiple bacteria, rather than just one, explained co-author Seth Shipman, from Harvard University in Massachusetts. "The information is not contained in a single cell, so each individual cell may only see certain bits or pieces of the movie. So what we had to do was reconstruct the whole movie from the different pieces," Dr Shipman told the BBC.

To "read" the information back, the researchers sequenced the bacterial DNA and used custom computer code to unscramble the genetic information, which spits out the images. The team was able to achieve 90% accuracy: "We were really happy with how it came out," Seth Shipman told me.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40585299