Puns in Forin

"RESPONDEZ S'IL VOUS PLAID
Honk if you're Scottish

...

HASTE CUISINE
Fast French food

E PLURIBUS ANUM
Out of any group, there's always one asshole"

DCblog: On foreign ludicity:

Ice-cream van music used to calm Belfast riot

This sounded to me like a nice use of initiative, not least because it appears to have been a non-violent solution which would change the mood of a crowd: "'An officer used the vehicle's tannoy system to play music to the youths in an effort to use humour to defuse the situation. The youths stopped throwing the bottles." sounds brilliant to me and the kind of action that we could do with training officers in! But not everyone thinks so: "However, police accept that this was not an appropriate action."
Why not? Readers of this blog are invited to explore further or share any further info. However, the reason for the reprimand don't appear to be good to me: a Sinn Fein official is reported to have commented: ""The PSNI are put on the streets to do a serious job and that is to keep order on the streets and face down antisocial elements. This is like a sick joke."
Iow: only violent or aggressive or 'serious' methods are allowed. Things that might defuse the situation are not serious. I think the official should remember who picks up the bill; community policing with the grain of the culture seems like a good idea to me. Since when did aggression and facing down do anything but ramp up the temperature and breed resentment and very likely add to the bill through continued vandalism and hospital bills?
The officer deserves a medal and commendation for quick strategic thinking.
Of course the main downside is that they probably can't repeat it. It's the creativity of it that worked.
WWJD?

Hope And History: Making Peace in Ireland
The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland

Prejudice vs empathy

This is interesting. It goes a bit beyond stating the bleeding obvious but confirms what we may have suspected. It's here: Racial bias clouds ability to feel others' pain, study shows. And perhaps a summary quote would be: "'This default reactivity of human beings implies empathy with the pain of strangers (i.e., a violet model) if no stereotype can be applied to them,' said Alessio Avenanti of the Universit�di Bologna. 'However, racial bias may suppress this empathic reactivity, leading to a dehumanized perception of others' experience.'"
It's good to know that empathy is a default for us (though we kind of knew that from research on mirror neurons and on early learning in infants). It is insightful to have confirmed that conceptual and affective dehumanising of others can radically interfere with empathy. Presumably this also helps us to begin to understand why counter-prejudicial actions such as helping people to meet others as 'human beings' (love your enemy?) are important and can work.

PowerPoint shapes strategy-making, says new paper

Readers of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding media: the extensions of man and The Medium is the Message will not be at all surprised. It is interesting, though, to see it applied to the presentation technology-complex represented by data-projectors, portable computing and GUI-driven software and the quasi-ubiquity of certain software in corporate environments. What I like about this is the attention to actual usage (cf Bourdieu et al). Article here: Love it or hate it, PowerPoint shapes strategy-making, says new paper. Here's a summary statement: "By studying the daily use of PowerPoint in strategy making, it was possible to see how meanings were negotiated through PowerPoint use, as a means for both collaborative efforts to generate ideas and cartographic efforts to divide up territories and pursue individual or group interests." It was good too, to see a recognition of the importance of its relative accessability: " "has radically changed who can participate. It has the potential to democratize strategy-making." The important thing, of course, is to understand just how to understand its effects in order to strategise for its use.

House-for-Duty Priests - do the figures add up?

This is the normal package I've noticed being advertised: "It is expected that for a House-for-Duty appointment the priest will carry out Sunday duties plus at least 2 other days each week. The house is for themselves and their family." What I'm wondering is where that apparently standard package comes from? I'm curious because I'm not sure that it is a well-founded figure. In fact, I think that it is probably over-pricing the house and/or underpricing the value of the ministry offered.

The latest I heard was that the cost to the CofE of a stipendiary post is £42k. This is made up of about £22k stipend, about £10k housing and £10k pension and other on-costs. Now, let's say a week consists of 21 sessions of potential work and let's take away 5 of those; 3 for a day off and 2 others to get a life (it really ought to be more but I'm aware of the realities in many cases). That gives us 16 sessions. On this schema, the house-for-duty package seems to be 5-7 sessions (2 or 3 per day and one for Sunday).

Now, if we take the whole £42k, then the stipend is worth about 8 (or 9) of those sessions, the on-costs about 4 and the housing about 4.

I hope it is now clear that, on this basis, a house for duty post, if offered pro-rata, should be asking for a work commitment of no more than Sunday duties and a further 3 sessions (1 or 1.5 days, depending).

Of course we should note that the £42k figure shouldn't really be treated as entirely remuneration; some of the on-costs are the kinds of things that are costs to the employer but not normally counted as remuneration. In addition we should note that there is a difficulty about insisting that housing goes with the job (in the case of stipindiaries) and then 'charging' a high rate for it when given the choice families might choose a cheaper house and more disposable income. There should be a notional discount in the figures for the value to the CofE of keeping someone 'on site'. These consideration would have the effect of reducing the sessional-value of a house for duty.

Now, why worry about this? Surely most house-for-duty priests are early retirees? Well, yes, at the moment. However, look at the financial situation. It does seem to me likely that in the future we could be seeing a greater number of self-supporting ministers who may be earning from another job or portfolio of work (eg consultancies). In the latter case, the abmount of their available time is crucial. Whether a house-for-duty post asks 1.5 or 2.5 days of them makes a difference to their earning capability and therefore to the viability of the self-supporting part of their portfolio. In other words, the housing needs to be costed properly so as to make for a fair possibility of the housing offer for SSMs.

Now if we said that the real figure for remuneration is £36k, then a session would be worth about £2.25k pa. On that basis the stipend would amount to about 9 or 10 sessions per week and the housing to 4 or 5 ie Sunday plus no more than 4 sessions which might reasonably equate to 2 days max. Obviously this figure is closer to the actual H4D advertised package. This would appear to be, then, the kind of figure actually being used somewhere to determine the value. Which means that we should stop being presented with the whole £42k figure as if it were remuneration ...
House-for-Duty Priests � Bishop David’s Blog:

Lib Dems U-turn on nuclear power?

The charge levelled is this: "The Liberal Democrats have ditched one of their most distinctive election pledges and will approve a new generation of nuclear power stations,"
I think that's misleading. Oh yes, it plays nicely into the typical journalistic trope about U-turns; dramatising and stirring emotional responses out of very little really. Is it really a U-turn by the Lib-Dems? I think not, and here's why.

Those of us opposing nukes for power have been saying for years(heck; search this blog for 'nuclear power' and you'll find stuff going back years on this) that -leaving aside the issues about storage and dangerous substances, terrorism and security- one of the big issues is that in 60 years of developing the technology, it's never been able to pay its way. It can only exist with subsidy. So, cannily, by insisting on no subsidy this becomes a de facto moratorium on nuclear power. In fact, if you see a nuke being built, you'll know a subsidy has been found somehow.

Of course the trick will be to hold the line on the subsidy issue. But remember, unlike most green tech may be enjoying temporary subsidies to build capacity, but that will be temporary. Nukes seem incapable of existing without subs.

Lib Dems perform U-turn on nuclear power | Politics | The Guardian

Intelligent ‘mulling’ of floating voters points to PR?

Worth pondering at this time: RSA The intelligent ‘mulling’ of floating voters : Social Brain: "I think it unlikely all floating voters are ‘irrational’. I think rather that many of them are ‘mulling’ over what is a very complicated choice: there are policy trade-offs, tactical-voting trade-offs and personality/character trade-offs. Not to mention trade-offs between these three sets of issues, as well as trade-offs around how long a party has been in power and whether this is healthy from a governance point of view.
In other words, voting is bloody complicated if you are not ideologically aligned. Waiting and mulling is a way of letting your automatic brain whir through all the possibilities and permutations below the surface of consciousness. The ‘hunch’ a floating voter may end up with as a result of this process can be a highly nuanced and intelligent decision. It’s just that the decision wasn’t a consciously controlled one. So what?"
I see this as a potential argument for a more proportional system. What we have in FPTP increasing the trade-offs needing to be considered because it effectively reduces the choice to two candidates. With only two choices (and this is the dynamic of the infamous 'two-party squeeze') then the likelihood is that each candidate is going to be a rich mix of the various concerns a voter may have; rarely will a candidate have a critical mass of a good majority of all the considerations and policies that a voter will want in a representive.

This relates to voting reform in this way: by making the system more effectively pluralist it is easier for a voter to find a candidate who has a critical mass of policy and characteristics whom they would feel more comfortable representing them in parliament AND, crucially, would feel would have some chance of actually representing them.How Should We Vote?: Democracy and Voting Reform in the UK (Democratic Audit Paper)

Skinny male mannequins, eating disorder?

Not sure that the apparent link with the female body image issue works with men, or at least not straight-forwardly. This is a salient bit from the report: Skinny male mannequins raise eating disorder fears | Life and style | The Guardian: "The company says the mannequins were modelled on teenage boys who were not anorexic, but were perfect for modelling the skinny jeans and slim tailoring made popular by stars such as Russell Brand. But eating disorder charity Beat said more men were suffering from anorexia and bulimia, and that the mannequins portrayed an unrealistic and unattainable image."
There are two related reasons why I think it may be more complicated than that. One is simply the way that in the gym age men with six packs, pecs and other well-developed muscle groups were/are a la mode. Skinny guys were out. So male body-image models have clearly got two desirable states at least in the west, only one of which involves starving yourself, potentially.

The other reason is the personally-related one. I was, before middle age metabolism kicked in, uber-skinny. So I know that some of us really were that way, without trying and healthy on it (I was right at the bottom of that graph for healthy weight to height ratio). That was a pain at first: the Charles Atlas, athletic look was fashionable. But Then, glam rock; skinny was 'in'. Glory! A way for us ectomorphs to have a bash at being envied or admired just for being ourselves!

Now one of my sons certainly has my erstwhile body type. Hates it. Can't help thinking that he'd feel a lot better about it if it really was likely to be in some way fashionable (again)...

Marriage and the single black woman

There are no figures here for the UK, but the potential parallel with the USA is intriguing. Have a look: Lexington: Sex and the single black woman | The Economist. Here, it seems to me, is the guts of the matter: "after crunching the census numbers, they found that a one percentage point increase in the male incarceration rate was associated with a 2.4-point reduction in the proportion of women who ever marry. Could it be, however, that mass incarceration is a symptom of increasing social dysfunction, and that it was this social dysfunction that caused marriage to wither? Probably not. For similar crimes, America imposes much harsher penalties than other rich countries. Mr Charles and Mr Luoh controlled for crime rates, as a proxy for social dysfunction, and found that it made no difference to their results. They concluded that “higher male imprisonment has lowered the likelihood that women marry…and caused a shift in the gains from marriage away from women and towards men.”"
What the article doesn't really explore is the wider ramifications for culture and social policy It's probably worth us looking at potential parallels with societies which have 'lost' many eligible young men in warfare and it is complicated by the interaction of social mores to do with sex, marriage, polygyny etc. However, we should note that the figures point to a similar, albeit less marked, effect among working class whites. Probably we should then note that this is a collateral effect of 'order and law' policies and consider that we need to weigh up incarceration and other approaches in part with their effects on the culture relating to marriage and childrearing. The irony for conservatives seems to be that the 'stronger' you are on 'locking 'em up' the more you undermine marriage and stable partnerships thus helping to perpetuate a bunch of other social outcomes you hate.