Links - 12th November 2019 (3)

Commentary: Team-building exercises can be a waste of time - "teams are social networks built on connections between individuals. It involves deep one-on-one conversations, designed to get people out of their comfort zones."
But they're just an excuse to have fun

Movie Mistakes: When does Film Continuity REALLY Matter? - YouTube
3 famous film editors don't care about continuity because if you're doing your job, it doesn't matter - other elements of each take are more important

2702 – Quintus Sertorius – Reluctant renegade, part 2 | The History Network - "It is important to note that in battles between the heavy infantry the casualty rate was very low, in stark contrast to the Hollywood portrayal. Legionaries were very well protected and to kill or wound an opponent, it was necessary to find a chink or weakness in the armor. For example, when Julius Caesar fought Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus Roman legionaries fought for several hours, with only comparatively few losses. The dramatic casualties were only incurred when one side broke and ran."

The retail revolution: How mail order changed middle-class life - "Ward's flyer had become a 72-page catalogue, listing nigh on 2,000 items... Despite being basically just a list of goods and prices, Ward's catalogue was later named by New York literary society, the Grolier Club, as one of the 100 most influential books published in America before 1900, up there with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Whole Booke of Psalmes.It was, the society said, "perhaps the greatest single influence in increasing the standard of American middle-class living".And it inspired competitors - notably Sears Roebuck, which soon became the market leader... for $892, Sears Roebuck would send you a five-room bungalow.Strictly speaking, you'd be sent "Lumber, Lath, Shingles, Mill Work, Flooring, Ceiling, Finishing Lumber, Building Paper, Pipe, Gutter, Sash Weights, Hardware and Painting Material". And plans of course, which were presumably rather more daunting than the ones you get from Ikea for a Billy Bookcase.Many of these mail order kit houses are still standing, 100 years on. Some have changed hands for more than $1m... drawing rural areas into the economy isn't just about expanding consumer choice and middle-class living standards: when you have good roads and access to information, you have more scope to make and sell stuff.Two economists studied how rural free delivery rolled out in America, and found that when it arrived in a new county, investment in manufacturing soon followed.The same process seems to be unfolding in China, which has its "Taobao Villages": clusters of rural enterprises producing everything from red dates to silver handicrafts to children's bicycles."

Why the bicycle's future looks bright - "The bicycle was a liberating force for women. They needed to shed their whalebone girdles and hoop-reinforced skirts in favour of something simpler and more comfortable. They would ride without chaperones, too.The forces of conservatism were alarmed, fretting that "immodest bicycling" would lead to masturbation, even prostitution. But these protests soon seemed laughable.As cycling historian Margaret Guroff points out, nobody seemed concerned about what Ms Allen was doing - only what she was wearing while she did it. A woman seen alone in public on a safety bicycle seemed no scandal at all. Three years later, the elderly Susan B Anthony, a women's rights activist for most of the 19th Century, declared that bicycling had "done more to emancipate woman than any one thing in the world"... It is tempting to view the bicycle as the technology of the past. The data shows otherwise.Half a century ago, world production of bikes and cars was about the same - 20 million each, per year. Production of cars has since tripled, but production of bicycles has increased twice as fast again - to around 120 million a year."

How did the qwerty keyboard become so popular? - "if qwerty really was designed to be slow, how come the most popular pair of letters in English, T-H, are adjacent and right under the index fingers? The plot thickens... The qwerty layout was designed for the convenience of telegraph operators transcribing Morse code - that's why, for example, the Z is next to the S and the E, because Z and SE are indistinguishable in American Morse code. The telegraph receiver would hover over those letters, waiting for context to make everything clear.So the qwerty keyboard wasn't designed to be slow. But it wasn't designed for the convenience of you and me, either... Many economists argue qwerty is the quintessential example of something they call "lock in".This isn't really about typewriters.It's about Microsoft Office and Windows, Amazon's control of the online retail link between online buyers and sellers, and Facebook's dominance of social media... The lock-in is the friend of monopolists, the enemy of competition, and may require a robust response from regulators.But maybe dominant standards are dominant not because of lock-in, but just because the alternatives simply aren't as compelling as we imagine.Consider the famous Navy study that demonstrated the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard.Two economists, Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis, unearthed that study, and concluded it was badly flawed. They also raised an eyebrow at the name of the man who supervised it - the Navy's leading time-and-motion expert, one Lieutenant-Commander… August Dvorak.Liebowitz and Margolis don't deny that the Dvorak design may be better: the world's fastest alphanumeric typists do use Dvorak's layout. In 2008, Barbara Bradford was recorded maintaining a speed of 150 words per minute (wpm) for 50 minutes, and reached a top speed of 212 wpm using such a keyboard.But they were just not convinced that this was ever an example where an entire society was desperate to switch to a hugely superior standard yet unable to co-ordinate."

Opinion: Is porn still driving the internet business? - "Credible-seeming statistics suggest that about one in seven web searches is for porn... The most-visited porn website – Pornhub – is roughly as popular as the likes of Netflix and LinkedIn. That’s pretty popular but still only enough to rank 28th in the world when I checked.But Avenue Q was first performed in 2003, an age ago in internet terms, and Trekkie Monster might have been more correct back then... just because people used the arts and crafts to depict erotica does not mean it was the driving force behind these techniques. There’s no reason to think it was.Consider Gutenberg’s printing press. Although titillating books were certainly printed, the main market for reading material was religious.A more plausible candidate, leaping ahead to the 19th Century, is photography.Pioneering studios in Paris did a roaring trade in so-called “art studies”, a euphemism the authorities didn’t always accept.Customers were willing to pay enough to fund the technology: for a time, it cost more to buy an erotic photograph than to hire a prostitute... In the late 1970s, most videotape sales were pornographic. Within a few years, the technology was more affordable for people who wanted to watch family films – and as the market expanded, porn’s share of it shrank.A similar story can be told about cable television – and, yes, the internet.Older readers might remember when getting online meant coaxing a dial-up modem into establishing a connection, then fretting about phone charges as it slowly chugged through a file that would nowadays download in the snap of a finger.What would motivate an ordinary person to persevere? You’ve guessed it.One 1990s study of Usenet discussion groups suggested five in six images shared were pornographic.A few years later, research into internet chat rooms indicated a similar proportion of activity devoted to sex."

Should we dislike the 'Like' button? - "Leah's content was being shown to fewer people, and her comics started to get fewer likes."It felt like I wasn't getting enough oxygen," she told Vice.com. "It was like, 'Wait a minute, I poured my heart and soul into this drawing, but it's only had 20 likes.'"... Faced with a sudden drop in likes, Leah is embarrassed to say she began buying ads on Facebook "just to get that attention back".There's an irony behind her discomfort.Before she was a comic artist, Leah was a Facebook developer, and in July 2007, her team invented the "like button"... in reality, it seems Facebook's potential for mind control is far from perfect.Some experts who've looked into Cambridge Analytica question how effective it really was. And for all the targeting, analysts report that the click-through rate on Facebook adverts still averages less than 1%..Perhaps we should worry more about Facebook's undoubted proficiency at serving us more adverts by sucking in an inordinate amount of our attention, hooking us to our screens."

The Penny Post revolutionary who transformed how we send letters - "Back then, you did not pay to send a letter. You paid to receive one. The pricing formula was complicated and usually prohibitively expensive.If the postman knocked on your door in the city of Birmingham, with a three-page letter from London, he would let you read it only if you coughed up two shillings and threepence.That was not far below the average daily wage, even though "the whole missive might not weigh a quarter of an ounce", just a few grams.People found workarounds.Members of Parliament could send letters free of charge, so if you happened to know one, they might "frank" your letters as a favour. The free-franking privilege was widely abused. By the 1830s, MPs were apparently penning an improbable seven million letters a year.Another common trick was to send coded messages through small variations in the address.You and I might agree that if you sent me an envelope addressed "Tim Harford", that would signify you were well, but that if you addressed it "Mr T Harford", I would understand you needed help. When the postman knocked, I would inspect the envelope, and refuse to pay... did the Penny Post also diffuse useful knowledge, and stimulate productive power?A group of economists recently came up with an ingenious test of this idea in the United States. They gathered data on the spread of post offices in the 19th Century, and the number of applications for patents from different parts of the country. New post offices did indeed predict more inventiveness, just as Hill would have expected."

The Cold War spy technology which we all use - "American radio operators stumbled upon the US ambassador's conversations being broadcast over the airwaves. These broadcasts were unpredictable: scan the embassy for radio emissions, and no bug was in evidence. It took yet more time to discover the secret. The listening device was inside The Thing - and it was ingeniously simple, little more than an antenna attached to a cavity with a silver diaphragm over it, serving as a microphone. There were no batteries or any other source of power. The Thing did not need them. It was activated by radio waves beamed at the US embassy by the Soviets. It used the energy of the incoming signal to broadcast back. When that signal was switched off, The Thing would go silent... When we debate the internet of things today, we usually refer not to RFID but to these devices, a world of highly-engineered complexity in which your toaster talks to your fridge for no good reason, and remotely-operated sex toys can reveal information about habits which most of us might regard as rather intimate."

How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely? - "the verb to ape, meaning to copy, is ironically misplaced: the only ape with the instinct to imitate is us.Tests reveal two-and-a-half year-old chimps and humans have similar mental capacities - unless the challenge is to learn by copying someone. The toddlers are vastly better at copying than the chimps. And humans ritualistically copy in a way that chimps do not. Psychologists call this over-imitation.It may seem like the chimps are the smart ones here. But if you are processing cassava roots, over-imitation is exactly what you should be doing.If Henrich is right, human civilisation is based less on raw intelligence than on a highly-developed ability to learn from each other"
Finally, something that distinguishes humans from animals?

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 240 - David Manheim on "Goodhart's Law and why metrics fail" - "'An aquarium that tried to train the dolphins in their aquarium to clean up the litter that people would toss into the pool. And so what they would do is they would reward the dolphins by giving them a fish if the dolphins brought them a piece of litter. Or like, a dead seagull.  And then one dolphin started tearing pieces of litter into smaller pieces -- because they were being rewarded based on the number of pieces of litter. So then they would trade each torn piece of litter in and get a fish for each one.  And then another dolphin started stockpiling fish. So they would get fish as a reward, but they wouldn't eat it right away. And they would stockpile the fish to then lure seagulls into the pool, and kill them. And then trade the dead seagull in for more fish'...
'The key thing that happens when we're talking about people falling prey to Goodhart's Law, organizations falling prey to Goodhart's Law, is that somebody mistakes the metric for the goal. So in organizations, what that means is that at some point, the purpose was lost. Here, I don't know if the purpose was lost. I think it was just somebody -- you know, “somebody”, a dolphin -- came up with a clever way to beat the system.'"

What Exactly Is ‘Natural Beef Flavor’? - "Is natural beef flavoring bad for you?
The flavor specifically? No. Neither is artificial beef flavoring, while we're at it. In fact, some scientists argue that artificial flavors, which are engineered and rigorously tested in a lab prior to their use in foods, may actually be safer than natural flavors. Whereas a natural flavor can contain hundreds of chemicals that are untested by the FDA, every component that goes into an artificial flavor must be approved for safe consumption."

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Did he lie to the Queen? - "Margaret Thatcher, a long serving British Prime Minister, only ever appointed one woman to her cabinet. There was one category she tolerated even less: men with beards. There were none of them. Tony Blair, one of her successors, also discouraged his colleagues from sporting facial hair. Apparently it didn't poll well among voters"