Links - 27th January 2020 (1)

How my iPhone landed me with a £476 fine and made me a criminal | Financial Times - "a bus inspector asked to see my £1.50 ticket. I had tapped into the bus with my iPhone using Apple Pay, but alas, in the five minutes since I’d boarded, my phone had run out of juice, so I had no means of proving that I had paid... I had been charged with failing to produce a valid ticket on a Transport for London service — and that I had 21 days to plead either “guilty or not guilty”. TfL said it had sent a letter ahead of this, but I never received it... I had recently switched my bank account to make use of a £100 bonus offer. And that meant the current account that had been linked to my Apple Pay in October no longer existed, so getting a statement was going to be tricky.My old bank told me they could get me a statement, but that they needed to send it to me in paper form, which would take 7-10 working days. And although I did give them my new address, they somehow sent the statement to the old one, delaying me by several more days.Finally, on January 16, I got the bank statement showing the date in question. There it was, on October 8: £6.80 for “TfL travel” on October 6. I was relieved to see that I had hit the payment cap for travel in zones 1 and 2: given that the bus in question was in zone 2, I would surely be vindicated. I swiftly sent off a picture of my bank statement to TfL and requested that they withdraw the charge.But a week later, I was told that the bank statement was not sufficient. “If you have registered your contactless card with TfL you are in a position to obtain your own detailed journey history,” I was told, while also advised to “urgently enter (my) plea”.Well, the problem was that I hadn’t registered my card, had I? And nor had I ever been told that I needed to — I was only faintly aware that registering a bank card was even possible... “There is no requirement for cards to be registered, the same as paying for any goods and services in a shop”. But it’s not the same, actually; in a shop, you are given a breakdown in the form of a receipt.I didn’t hear back from the woman at TfL; though it later said it had sent a letter, I never received one. But a few days later, I received a letter telling me that my case had been heard in a magistrates' court, that I had been found guilty, and I owed £476.50. By now I was feeling quite put out. I tried the number I’d originally called, but they couldn’t help, and I was given another number to call. That pointed me to an email address I was to write to, appealing against the decision. Having had no reply from that, I was given another email address, and still no reply. I sent five emails during these weeks — all of them unanswered, despite my labelling the messages “Urgent”.On April 26, £476.50 was docked from my pay cheque, as instructed by the court... I had an interview at the US Embassy in London for a media “I” visa for a five-week “bleisure” trip — California for a holiday and New York for work. I was due to set off on May 4... I was told in no uncertain terms by a most disagreeable official that there was no way I would be travelling to the US on May 4, and that I needed to get a police records certificate before they would even think about issuing me with a visa.I finally got my passport back, and my US visa, almost two weeks after I was due to travel, having spent another £90 on the certificate. My flights were non-exchangeable and non-refundable. By this stage I was over £1,000 down and I couldn’t afford to rebook my flights. The whole trip was off... I have now invested in a portable charger. I must stop forgetting to charge it."Being unable to turn on your phone is basically like losing your paper ticket

Why is the world's financial plumbing under pressure? - "In June 1887, Mr Primrose sent a message to his agent in Kansas about buying wool. Because the Western Union telegraph company charged by the word, the message was in code to save money. It was supposed to say "BAY ALL KINDS QUO", meaning "I've bought half a million pounds of wool".  But it actually read "BUY ALL KINDS QUO", which the Kansas agent understood as an instruction to "Please buy half a million pounds of wool".  Primrose lost $20,000 - several million dollars in today's terms.  And Western Union wouldn't compensate him, because he could have paid a few cents extra for the message to be verified - but had not.  Clearly, there was a need for a way to send financial information more reliably than through a vacuum tube and more securely than via telegraph in an easily-mistranscribable code."
Episode 139: Witches, Bitches — The Art History Babes - "‘The Spanish Inquisition, strangely enough, were very skeptical about witches and didn't really worry that much about witches. It seems that the Protestants were way more freaked out about witches. Puritan, Protes-, oh, they were like very, very afraid and you could literally just be a pubescent girl who maybe just disobeyed a couple of times and someone could label you a witch and you would either shape up or ship out.’"

Episode 142: Spooky Corner: Zombies — The Art History Babes - "‘The hugely important 1968 George Romero first film Night of the Living Dead. We all know Night of the Living Dead and I'm sure you do too, even if you haven't seen it because famously George Romero never copyrighted the movie. So in every horror movie ever, if there's a horror movie on the screen in that movie, it's Night of the Living Dead because it's in the public domain… this movie, not even, not just made zombies huge in cultural importance. It also basically created the modern horror movie... I’ll be so surprised if you didn't come out of that movie saying like, oh man, it was so cliched. It did all these different stuff. It's not cliche. This is the one that started all those cliches. This is the origin of the modern horror that it basically brought gore and nihilism to horror, which, surprisingly, wasn't there really prior to this... The zombies eat people in this one. They're all cannibals. That did not happen until this movie. All of these survivors are holed up into a house. The commentary in this movie is the scariest thing is not outside trying to get in. It's what's inside... there's a white family in there with another patriarchal figure that is struggling to cope with taking orders from this other [black] man'...
There are local police basically going up and rounding up and shooting zombies in the head, which is another thing this one's brought to the zombie lore is that you can only kill zombies by shooting in the head, thank you Night of the Living Dead... Return of the Living Dead, of the same year 1985. Which brought another famous trope to zombies that I'm sure you all know, that zombies eat brains. That didn't happen until this movie… I love Return of the Living Dead, I think it's a fun movie but it is not the the cultural phenomenon that things like Night of the Living Dead, or Dawn of the Dead were and we're now at, you know, 1985 and the first zombie film was 1932"

Episode 143: The Art of Instagram with Caroline Calloway — The Art History Babes - "‘I studied art history at Cambridge University. It's a three year program. absolutely incredible. They use the City of Cambridge to actually teach you the history of art, everything from putting you in buses and taking you out to look at cave paintings to the Roman ruins that Cambridge is based on. Cantabria was the Roman river port, and that's actually what our emails are. It's @cantab.net... from all that up into the Baroque chapels and Gothic architecture and the modern art that is in collections in the different colleges. And so you get a really exhaustive look at the full sweep of the history of art. A pattern that I've seen repeated over and over is that technology is always looked down upon. You know, first it was like new pigments and paint and synthetic pigments seeing as, like, of lesser merit. But more, I think more analogous is the example of the introduction of photography, when like cameras were first invented, I mean, people were like, this is technology. This is science. This is too democratized because anyone can buy a fucking camera. And you know, you have to go to ‘art school’ to learn how to paint. And it was also younger people who were interested in buying cameras and making art with it. And now, almost every major museum in the world has a photography collection, and I'm not out here trying to say that all Instagram posts are fine art or every tweet, you know, is art. But I'm not saying every short story or every painting is good art. I really just think we need a reevaluation of, of how much potential we allow social media to have as an expressive media, as an expressive medium. And I also think a twin bias with our bias against technology is our bias against media that is the purview of young women in particular. And Instagram has really become an area where young women express themselves visually and if you just look at anything, you know, samplers come to mind, you know, things that, embroidery, things that were sort of like girl crafts scrapbooks, another good example. All of these things were things that young girls did for creative expression. And they're not considered fine art. I mean, but barely so'"
Applied and decorative arts like wrought iron candlesticks aren't considered fine art either. But because they're made by men you can't blame sexism

Sexual Economics : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘How do men want sex to be portrayed?’
‘In general, men like sex and find sex appealing. And so in general men like sex based ads, when they see an ad that uses very sexual imagery, their general predisposition is to like it. Now, I'm going to tell you later that we found one exception to this, which is extremely notable.’ ‘Tell me now’
‘Okay, tell you now. So we made some sex based ads. And we refigured them sort of, and we decided to change the features in them. And in one experiment, we decided to make the ad be particular to a man giving a woman a gift. And so we have a sexual ad. And then alongside it is a woman's watch and the woman's watch is said to be a gift from a man to that special woman in his life. And in this experiment, and this experiment alone, there's been no other data like this in the literature, we find that men do not like a sexual add when it reminds them that they have to give up resources in order to be in a sexual context.’
‘So men like sex, but they like free sex more than paid sex’
‘Indeed, and they like to, they prefer to not think about sex in terms of resource exchange. But women, on the other hand, find the idea of resource exchange very appealing. And so if you remind women, in many different forms, we’ve done this several different ways, if you remind them that they may be getting resources or that some women may be getting resources to be sexual, then they like sexual ads more.'"

What Makes a Drug Desirable? : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has estimated that if an average student takes Ritalin while writing their SAT, they'll do, they'll score like 100 points higher or something like that.’"

Making Difficult Decisions : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If somebody else chooses for you unappetizing food, you kind of okay with it but if you have to choose yourself that's really miserable. And part of it is you blame yourself for it?’..
‘You feel responsible for like an undesirable outcome... We thought about healthcare, and we thought that there are a lot of situations in which you have options in front of you, or for example, health treatment or cancer treatment, and all of these options are undesirable. Do you want to have radiation, or do you want to have camo or do you want to have surgery... But somehow, nowadays different from like about 30 years ago. This choice is up to the patients.’"

The Irrationality of Sports Betting : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘People are optimistic about their favorite teams. So they, they're not only more likely to bet on favorites versus underdogs, sort of across all games, but they also are more likely to bet on teams they like versus teams they dislike, but those two effects are independent, independent’
‘Because I always thought that from a portfolio perspective, you should always bet on a team that that you don't like. Because then you'll be a little bit happy regardless of the outcome. Whereas if you've bet on a team that you like, you'll be happy when they won and happy when you get the money, but there'll be fewer, you will not spread the happiness across all games.
‘Yeah, so that's like an emotional hedge, basically. And, in fact, I'm the only person I know who does that. So I bet, I do when I place bets, I bet against my favorite team, in order to, in order to hedge emotionally and when I tell that to other people, they think I'm crazy... One reaction I get when I tell people this is that somehow I'm being immoral. By betting against my team’"

Cheating is Par for the Course : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "[On golf] People feel basically okay to hit the ball a little bit with the golf club, they feel a little bit worse about kicking it with their feet because it's more direct, you touching it more, and they feel much, much worse about picking it up and moving it directly with their hands. And again, I think the idea is that, as we have something that is less direct, that is more, has more steps between us and the ball, people feel more comfortable cheating. And finally, we also ask the question of when would people cheat more, when they play against the friend, their boss or a client? And it turns out the people are the most honest when they play with the boss, least honest when they play with friends and clients, kind of in the middle... people think that they cheat much less than other people, by about five times more... we asked them what industry they were from… And it turns out that one of the most cheating industries were - advertising. Okay, maybe not the big surprise. But what was nice was that people in advertising actually cheated a lot, but they recognize it. When we asked them how much are people in your industry cheating, people in advertising basically said, we're cheating and we know it. Another interesting industry was law enforcement. Those people cheat more than average, but actually don't think that they cheat at all."

The Bribery Index : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘What differentiates one culture from another, we found that one of the biggest differentiators is how interdependent or dependent, the people within a particular country actually feel. So how collectivist… we find a very high correlation between collectivism and bribery’"

Children and Cheating : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "'People often think that the kids somehow are moral beings, that they're somehow nicer than we are, even though they punch each other and kick each other and steal things, that they have some sort of purity, inherent goodness of youth that then the world beats out of them over time... even I think when you see kids behaving badly, you still somehow see it as differently motivated than when grown ups behave badly. Kids, it's maybe they’re need a nap or they're out of control, or they need a snack. They’re not really bad'...
'One other interpretation of this is the kids, that young kids are more pure. They’re just more pure about their selfish motivations... they are more honest in their selfish[ness]'"

Cultures of Corruption : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If I've been brought up in a place where people flout the law, I take it to New York City and where I'm able to the flout the law without consequence I do so. As opposed to the Swedes, for example, who grow up in a high legal compliance society. And when they move to Manhattan, and have the opportunity to break the law with no legal consequences, they don't... I think a big part of it, a big part of what governs behavior is what I think everyone else is doing or will do. And so if I grow with people not obeying the police, and I have the opportunity to not obey the police and not suffer the consequences, I will do so... European parliamentarians get paid a stipend of around 300 euros for each day they show up to work, sign the register. Now there was a scandal a few years ago, captured on film by an Austrian Member of the European Parliament, of parliamentarians literally leaving their cars idling outside, running in, signing the register and then running, running out and driving off… some might call it corruption. But it doesn't involve the police... [This] is similarly correlated with home country corruption. You get a lot of this from Italian and Greek MEPs, not so much from the Swedes.’"