Links - 3rd October 2019 (2)

Govia Thameslink fined £1m over Gatwick Express window death - "A rail firm has been fined £1m after a man died leaning out of a train window.Simon Brown, 24, was killed when he hit his head on a steel gantry on the side of the track while on the Gatwick Express in London in August 2016.In May, Govia Thameslink Railway admitted a health and safety breach because a sign saying not to lean out was not displayed clearly enough. The rail regulator has written to firms demanding "immediate action" over trains with these types of windows.Judge Jeffrey Pegden QC, at Southwark Crown Court, said while there was a warning sticker on the door, it was "jumbled" around other notices."The signage around the window was confusing," he said, adding no risk assessment of the windows had been carried out... The Office of Rail and Road said there were about 1,500 of the "droplight" windows - which allow passengers to reach through to open doors from the outside once the train has stopped at a station - in circulation on the rail network."
British people must be very stupid, since they need to be told very clearly not to put their heads out of train windows
The photo of the window indicates a lot of other important notices, so the next time when another calamity happens the railway can be fined again because those notices were made less prominent - in order to make the one about not sticking your head out more obvious

'Masturbation helps you fall asleep': German health insurer's self-help campaign goes viral

The Hidden Cost of GoFundMe Health Care | The New Yorker - "A third of the money raised on GoFundMe in 2017 was for medical expenses. This isn’t surprising, given that the United States has the highest over-all health-care costs in the developed world. Since 2008, health-insurance deductibles have increased eight times as quickly as wages. A study in The American Journal of Medicine last fall found that 42.4 per cent of the 9.5 million people diagnosed with cancer between 2000 and 2012 had depleted their assets within two years... In crowdfunding, this kind of storytelling has become crucial to success. “The story is obviously the paramount piece of any campaign, whether you’re raising capital for a big tech idea or raising capital for a problem you have,” Roy Morejon, the president and co-founder of Enventys Partners, a prominent crowdfunding consulting firm, told me. A good story attracts attention, from which more attention often grows. “We’ve now launched more than a thousand crowdfunding campaigns, and what we’ve seen at work is FOMO—the fear of missing out—and a sense of urgency,” he said. “Nobody wants to be the first person on the dance floor, but, once there’s a party on the dance floor, people join in.” In most successful campaigns, the first third of funding comes from one’s real-life community. “Once that happens, you usually have about an eighty-per-cent success rate to fully fund the ask”... Yet putting so much weight on storytelling also underscores its limits. Stories dictate their own span: beginning, middle, resolution. This is not how major change happens, and the strength of social storytelling—its ability to make problems seem individual and ordered—can also become a weakness. Storytelling looks past all the interlocking motions of society in favor of the personal, the private, the atomized view. (In “Mary Poppins,” when young Michael incites a run on the bank and then goes off flying kites, we don’t see the effects of this financial collapse beyond Cherry Tree Lane.)... Cataldo was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree theft by deception. She did not have cancer. Through two GoFundMe campaigns, she had fraudulently raised thirty-eight thousand dollars; altogether, she had taken in nearly half a million dollars, most of it through a seven-year false narrative perpetrated on her family and friends... “People erroneously assume that GoFundMe is doing fact checking,” Adrienne Gonzalez, who monitors the platform on her Web site, GoFraudMe, said... The risk in giving medical aid on the basis of stories is that the theatre of change trumps actual systemic reform; the guy with resources helps an ailing friend, or donates to a stranger whose experiences resonate, and believes that he’s done his part. Meanwhile, the causes of problems go untouched."

Stan Lee's daughter sides with Sony in Spider-Man spat with Disney - "While many fans have rallied behind Disney in the wake of reports that talks had broken down between the company and Sony over future Spider-Man films, at least one person is standing behind Sony — Stan Lee’s daughter.In a statement to TMZ, Joan Lee said Marvel and Disney need to be “checked and balanced” as they seek total control of her father’s creations. “Whether it’s Sony or someone else’s, the continued evolution of Stan’s characters and his legacy deserves multiple points of view”... Lee seemed to support Sony’s decision not to accept this new co-financing deal.“When my father died, no one from Marvel or Disney reached out to me,” Lee said. “From day one, they have commoditized my father’s work and never shown him or his legacy any respect or decency. In the end, no one could have treated my father worse than Marvel and Disney’s executives.”"

'London Bridge is down': the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death - "For a long time, the art of royal spectacle was for other, weaker peoples: Italians, Russians, and Habsburgs. British ritual occasions were a mess. At the funeral of Princess Charlotte, in 1817, the undertakers were drunk. Ten years later, St George’s Chapel was so cold during the burial of the Duke of York that George Canning, the foreign secretary, contracted rheumatic fever and the bishop of London died. “We never saw so motley, so rude, so ill-managed a body of persons,” reported the Times on the funeral of George IV, in 1830. Victoria’s coronation a few years later was nothing to write home about. The clergy got lost in the words; the singing was awful; and the royal jewellers made the coronation ring for the wrong finger. “Some nations have a gift for ceremonial,” the Marquess of Salisbury wrote in 1860. “In England the case is exactly the reverse.”What we think of as the ancient rituals of the monarchy were mainly crafted in the late 19th century, towards the end of Victoria’s reign. Courtiers, politicians and constitutional theorists such as Walter Bagehot worried about the dismal sight of the Empress of India trooping around Windsor in her donkey cart. If the crown was going to give up its executive authority, it would have to inspire loyalty and awe by other means – and theatre was part of the answer. “The more democratic we get,” wrote Bagehot in 1867, “the more we shall get to like state and show.”"

If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You’re More Likely to Be Happy at Work - "employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business. This suggests that received wisdom about what makes a good boss may need some rethinking. It’s not uncommon to hear people assert that it’s a bad idea to promote an engineer to lead other engineers, or an editor to lead other editors. A good manager doesn’t need technical expertise, this argument goes, but rather, a mix of qualities like charisma, organizational skills, and emotional intelligence. Those qualities do matter, but what our research suggests is that the oft-overlooked quality of having technical expertise also matters enormously... The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction. Even we were surprised by the size of the measured effect. For instance, among American workers, having a technically competent boss is considerably more important for employee job satisfaction than their salary (even when pay is really high)... The bottom line is that employees are happiest when the boss knows what she or he is talking about, and that drives performance: there is growing evidence, from randomized trials done under laboratory conditions, that when you make workers happier they become more productive. One study found that quite small boosts in happiness went on to produce a reliable 12% extra in labor productivity. Moreover, employees who are happy at work are less prone to quit, and it is well known that a high level of quits is expensive for a company. Lastly, it has recently been demonstrated that firms with happy employees go on to have better stock-price growth in the future."

YouGov survey: British sarcasm 'lost on Americans' - "Plenty of Americans working in the UK have complained about British passive-aggressiveness, or their annoying tendency to beat around the bush"

Retire at 55 and live to 80; work till you're 65 and die at 67. Startling new data shows how work pounds older bodies. - "The studies were based on the number of Pension Fund cheques sent to Boeing retirees. The Boeing experience was that employees retiring at age 65 received pension cheques for 18 months, on average, prior to death. A similar experience was discovered at Lockheed Martin, where on average, employees received pension cheques for just 17 months.Apparently the experiences at Ford Motor Company and Bell Labs were similar to those of Boeing and Lockheed. Statistics at a pre-retirement seminar illustrated that the average age of retirement at most large corporations in the US was 57. So people retiring at age 65 are a minority, but it is still a startling statistic.The thought is that the hard working late retirees (65) are more than likely putting too much stress on their ageing bodies and minds and due to the stress, they develop a variety of health problems. The associated stress induced health problems lead to them dying within two years of retirement.Another startling statistic from the same Corporations is that those who retire earlier, say age 55, tend to enjoy their retirement on average for more than 25 years. The chances are that those able to retire earlier have less stress, have planned and managed their lives better, with respect to finances, health and career and are able to retire comfortably.One important observation is that these younger retirees (55) aren’t necessarily idle in retirement, but they are far less stressed than their working counterparts from age 55 to 65. This means they may be busying themselves with part time work, hobbies and things they enjoy doing, so much so that ‘work’ becomes fun and is done at a more leisurely pace."

Where are Singapore noodles from if not from Singapore? - "According to renowned Singaporean chef Damian D’Silva, the dish started in Hong Kong. “Created in either the 50s or 60s by chefs in Hong Kong, they wanted to make something exotic, hence the addition of curry powder. I believe the name is a coincidence, as the chefs felt it would add to the ‘exotic’ nature of the dish, due to the fact that Singapore wasn’t as well-known during that time. The dish then spread overseas and to Europe during the travels of the Hong Kong chefs while they were under British rule,” says chef D’Silva, who champions Singapore’s heritage food in his Eurasian and Peranakan restaurant Folklore, and who was a judge on last year’s inaugural MasterChef Singapore. When visiting Singapore, the closest dish would be Xin Chow (the old name of Singapore) Bee Hoon, or Sin Chew Bee Hoon, which is made from stir-fried vermicelli, vegetables, seafood and soy sauce – no curry powder or sliced red peppers here... “One side of the argument would be that it showcases different aspects of cuisines that are commonly found in Singapore, thanks to the different prevalent cultures due to our location as a trading port. Stir-frying is a Chinese style of cooking; rice vermicelli is one of the main noodle types that Chinese, Malay and Indian cuisine all use. Curry is as universal as it gets in Singapore”... “Singapore is known for trying to combine a bit of everything when it comes to cooking. In that sense, one could argue that the entire dish, from the ingredients to the way the dish is put together, is very much reflective of Singapore,” he says, adding that even when cooking Italian cuisine at Bar Cicheti, he tries to add the big, bold flavours loved by locals."
Too bad Hong Kong noodles seem to only be found in Singapore, probably because comparatively few Singaporeans migrate

The CubeSat revolution changing the way we see the world - "CubeSat pioneers have embraced the fail-fast model of Silicon Valley.Nasa, as a public agency, has a very low tolerance for risk. But an expendable CubeSat allows a different approach: if you're launching dozens at a time, you can lose one or two here and there. While Nasa has traditionally focused on ensuring that expensive kit works perfectly, the CubeSat model says don't worry.Failing with disposable satellites is cheaper than succeeding with big ones. If it doesn't work, try again.But third, don't dismiss the public sector too casually. It is easy to define private space exploration in contrast with Nasa and other national space agencies.Image copyright NASA. In fact Nasa has quietly supported CubeSats - by funding small CubeSat-launching rockets. It has also given CubeSats free rides to the International Space Station, where they can be launched through a special airlock"

Killed for spying: The story of the first factory - "The Russian revolutionaries were not slow to embrace the factory.In 1913, Lenin had condemned the stopwatch-driven, micromanaging studies of engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor as "advances in the extortion of sweat". After the revolution, the stopwatch was in the other hand, with Lenin announcing: "We must organise in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system.""

The Long Island Iced Tea company said it's pivoting to blockchain — and its stock is soaring by more than 400% - "Shares of The Long Island Iced Tea Corporation soared as much as 432% pre-market Thursday morning after the company said it would change it’s name to Long Blockchain Corp.
The company will continue to sell its line of bottled drinks based on the eponymous cocktail, it said, but its parent company "is shifting its primary corporate focus towards the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology"

'Long Blockchain' Maybe Not as Smart as It Thought - "Remember “Long Blockchain,” or rather, the company formerly known as Long Island Iced Tea Corp. that saw its stock skyrocket after it changed its name to refer to the foundational technology behind the cryptocurrency boom and made a vague pivot to “globally scalable blockchain technology solutions”? Turns out that might not have been so smart!... Long Blockchain now hovers at a value of $5 million, well below both the nearly $70 million it shot up to after changing its name in December and the roughly $20 million it was originally worth before that."