Links - 20th July 2020 (1)

Choice Blindness in Psychology - "The concept of choice blindness suggests that people are not always aware of their choices and preferences. Choice blindness is a part of a cognitive phenomenon known as the introspection illusion. Essentially, people incorrectly believe that they fully understand the roots of their emotions and thoughts, yet believe that other people's introspections are largely unreliable.According to research on this topic, even when you don't get what you want, there's a strong chance that you won't even notice. And you may even defend a choice just because you think it's the one you made."

Nearly 250 Pages of Devastating Internal Facebook Documents Posted Online By UK Parliament - "Facebook really didn’t want this to happen. On Wednesday, a British politician who has been highly critical of the social media giant publicly dumped a huge cache of sensitive internal Facebook documentsfor anyone to download and read.The documents include details on the distribution of Facebook’s various apps; how the company worked very closely with some app developers to grant them access to user data, and how the company specifically incentivizes sharing on the platform in order to feed that data back to advertisers. They also include information about how the company tried to hide and downplay the amount of data that it collected from the Android version of the Facebook app."

Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Their Safety - The New York Times
Comment: "I noticed the documented accounts in the article all were in California, NY and Maryland. Red States! This problem, discrimination, has always been the worst in the liberal conclaves." - Bill Virginia, March 24

Underwater Nuclear Reactor In Singapore - "Underwater nuclear power plant has several advantages. Since nuclear plants employ steam-generators, which require large amount of water to cool the condensers, the ocean environment serves as a huge heat sink with nearly unlimited amount of cooling water. Underwater sitting also reduces the potential effect ground motion due to seismic events. In addition, the effect of fume release in case of nuclear accident is reduced when the reactor is located underwater."

Laypeople Can Predict Which Social Science Studies Replicate - "Large-scale collaborative projects recently demonstrated that several key findings from the social science literature could not be replicated successfully.  Here we assess the extent to which a finding’s replication success relates to its intuitive plausibility. Each of 27 high-profile social science findings was evaluated by 233 people without a PhD in psychology. Results showed that these laypeople predicted replication success with above-chance performance (i.e., 58%). In addition, when laypeople were informed about the strength of evidence from the original studies, this boosted their prediction performance to 67%"

How McDonald's revolutionised business - "Wouldn't you want to design your own branding and develop your own menu? Why pay the McDonald's corporation $45,000 (£34,000) plus 4% of gross sales, just so it can send an inspector to watch you scrub your own toilets?Well, much of what you are paying for is the benefit of the brand - and if you are being monitored to make sure you do not cut corners that damage the brand, you can feel reassured that your fellow franchisees are too. As for the franchisor, why not own and operate new branches yourself? Many companies do both - McDonald's owns about 15% of its 36,000-odd outlets.But franchisees bring a lot to the company, like hard cash: a McDonald's restaurant can cost more than $1m (£768,000) to launch.Franchisees also provide local knowledge, especially important if you are expanding into a new country with an unfamiliar culture. And there is motivation: an owner-manager with their own money at stake might put more effort into keeping costs down than a manager on a corporate salary.The economist Alan Krueger found evidence that may support this idea: workers and shift supervisors apparently earn more in company-owned fast food outlets than franchised ones.Of course, both sides bear some risk. The franchisor has to trust that the franchisee will work hard; the franchisee has to trust that the franchisor will create and advertise exciting new products.When both sides worry about the other side shirking, it's known as "double-sided moral hazard". A branch of economics called agency theory tries to understand how franchise contracts solve this problem through their mix of upfront fees and percentage payments.But it seems to work, perhaps because - like Kroc and the McDonald brothers - different entrepreneurs want different things."

New Classical Tracks: Lang Lang rediscovers pieces from his youth in 'Piano Book' | Classical MPR - "‘Have you ever sat down at the piano and started to play - chopsticks? It's actually a pretty well known waltz, and Lang Lang has a lot of fun with that very familiar Waltz, and many other pieces of music that you might have learned as you were growing up taking piano lessons’...
‘I want to tell a story when I was a four years old boy, I watched Horowitz in Moscow. And one of the most beautiful piece which I remember so well was the Schumann's Traumerei. And I even remembered my neighbors even play that piece. So technically, it's not a, not a very difficult piece. But when I heard Horowitz doing it, it's like the highest artistic level. I made everyone emotionally weeping their eyes. And so then I realized the pieces, which I'm doing in that moment - Fur Elise, you know, those pieces are not only for children, it’s also for green musicians as well. But obviously, when I was four or five, I'm just playing the note with a good feeling. That's all, you know, but not in the very high standard of artistic interpretations. So at age of 36, I thought, you know, it's time to revisit those pieces, and to really inspire the new music generations to have the confident to play those pieces in a more artistic way.’
‘You call these true masterpieces. Why is that?’
‘Yeah, I think those pieces are really in a way quite underrated because people hear it from the ringtone. People hear it from somewhere, you know, so they, they probably thought, oh, those pieces just for beginners, you know, everybody can play it, it's not a big deal. But actually, those pieces are real masterpieces just like what Horowitz played Traumerei, right, you'll realize this is not a children's piece.’"

New Classical Tracks: Hear a retelling of the Nativity story in Margaret Bonds' 'The Ballad of the Brown King' | Classical MPR - "There was a book that was being passed around, and it was music by black female composers. And I'm, I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, you know, I've gone through an undergraduate degree, a master's degree, and I've never come across a reference book that was solely dedicated to music by my ancestors... I was always the only black female in my music classes"
Apparently she doesn't realise the link

Episode 151: Art History BB: Bayeux Tapestry — The Art History Babes - "Fun fact, it's not technically a tapestry… the definition of tapestry if you didn't know according to Wikipedia, Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven by hand on a loom. Tapestry is weft-faced weaving, in which all the warp threads are hidden in the completed work, unlike cloth weaving where both the warp and the weft threads may be visible. In tapestry weaving, weft yarns are typically discontinuous; the artisan interlaces each coloured weft back and forth in its own small pattern area. It is a plain weft-faced weave having weft threads of different colors worked over portions of the warp to form the design… weft, which in weaving is the cross wise threads on a loom over and under in which other threads - the warp - are passed to make cloth. So my understanding of all that Is that a tapestry includes the weaving in of the colored thread into the actual cloth as opposed to embroidering on top of the cloth. And what we have with the Bayeux Tapestry is more of an embroidery, right. They embroidered the image onto the cloth. They didn't incorporate it as part of the cloth"

Is Classical Music Really Dead? | NAC Podcasts | National Arts Centre - "Most pop music is related in a lot of ways back to gospel. And gospel is related to church music of the 17th, 18th century from Central Europe…
‘So that's a traditional melody from the 18th century. And then if you take, you can hear how they're basically the same chords, yeah? Gospel, written 1963 or so, it's by Billy, Billy Taylor. Then you take a couple of years later. You know the song, yeah? I see skies of blue. What a wonderful world. Same chords… You know, Sonny? Yeah. Okay, basically exactly the same chords. Now, that means you've got 300 years of history, you'd say one is pop, one is gospel, the other one is traditional classical. They’re the same. The DNA of music is exactly the same, the chords are virtually identical. There's a couple of added notes here in it. And the interesting thing also is when we talk about classical music versus pop, the same principles are at play. So if we take the song that I was playing, which is called, I wish I knew how it feel to be free by Billy Taylor. We've got a home base, which is F major, and he goes, home base, and then he moves to the relative minor, which will make you feel a little bit melancholy. Yeah. And then what he does is he moves through the home base to the second most closely related key. Home base, B flat major, which is the second most related key and then to the most related key, C major. Back to home base. So that's the first phrase let’s say it's called the A… And then what he does, what he does is he does a little B section where he moves from F major home to the closest related home. Okay, which is C major... then he says, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to play the first bit again. Okay, so we got ABA, and he says, I'm gonna stick a little taillight, let's call it C. Okay, so we got AB AC, and this is a pop song. Basically, it's a gospel song, but it's, all pop songs work on the same principle. Now what you have there in mini, is what all first movements of symphonies are based on… which is called sonata form'...
'What's weird about pop music is that, at least for the past, you know, 50 years or so we thought about the text of pop music is the record. You know, so Grateful Dead, the text is that recording. And you go to a concert, I don't know if you've been to, you know, any pop concerts, but basically the situation is, every time they play the hits everyone's happy. And then they say, this is something from the new album, and everyone goes uhh... Because… what they want to experience is that record which they've experienced by themselves at home. And it's a fascinating thing. I mean, I think this is sort of one of the lovely privileges that we have as classical musicians, is to take something from texts and transmute that into vibrating air and vibrating space.'"

Meeting a new coworker – Safe For Work – Podcast – Podtail - "Terry Gilliam, he named his film company Poo Poo Pictures. Specifically because he loved the concept of suits at some corporate studio talking about: what do we do about Poo Poo? We've got to get Poo Poo in here. How do we work with Poo Poo?"

Powerful antibiotics discovered using AI

Through the glass, darkly - China’s reputation for low-cost manufacturing under attack | Finance and economics | The Economist - "Mr Cao hit a nerve with his claim that it was more costly to run a business in China than in America. He should know. His company, Fuyao Glass, bought an old General Motors factory in Ohio in 2014 and announced plans to invest $200m there. Mr Cao claimed that the overall tax on manufacturers is 35% higher in China than in America. Once China’s higher land and energy costs are factored in, the advantages of its lower labour costs disappear, he said."

Trade war: Can Vietnam replace China as a global manufacturing hub? - "The trade war has also led companies to start or expand manufacturing in Vietnam — accelerating a trend that began years ago when rising costs in China pushed manufacturers to seek cheaper locations... no single country “can really absorb all of that production” looking to shift out of China as a result of the trade war"

Native English speakers fall behind children of immigrants in GCSE maths and English - "Native English speakers have fallen behind the children of immigrants in GCSE maths and English, an official analysis has found.According to the latest data from the Department for Education, 43.2 per cent of native English speakers gained grades 9-5 in English and maths in 2019, compared to 43.8 per cent their peers who speak English as an additional language.Native speakers were also outperformed by their non-native speaking peers in 2017.  The figures also show that white pupils are the least likely to enter for the eBacc subjects when sitting GCSEs.Just 37.5 per cent of white teenagers enter for the award, which is the lowest proportion out of all other ethnic groups... Chinese students were the most likely to obtain Ebacc, with 61.6 per cent getting the award. Meanwhile, 50.6 per cent of Asian students, 46.5 per cent of black students and 44.3 per cent of mixed race students obtained the award."
Damn racism and xenophobia! It's all the fault of Brexit!

Meme - "Now that I have children I really understand the scene in Return of the Jedi where Yoda is so tired of answering Luke's questions he just up and dies"

Women's marital surname change by bride's age and jurisdiction of residence: A replication - "Hyphenating or keeping premarital surname for all U.S. destination brides marrying in Hawai'i in 2010 was highly, positively correlated with a state-level women's income measure (r = .78, p < .000) and the analogous statistic for men (r = .64, p < .000), by bride's state of residence. The women's measure, only, remained significant when both predictors were used, together, to predict retention/hyphenation (i.e., under regression of both predictors). The interaction of state Gini coefficient and the women's income measure was positively predictive in a regression including the interaction components as predictors (adjusted-R-squared = .66). None of several other predictors suggested by previous research or related to Gini index or income, testable using available, state-level data, were predictive (under regression) alongside the women's income measure. The older the bride, from any jurisdiction, the more likely she is to hyphenate or keep her surname (chi-squared (1) for linear trend = 1754.65, p < .000). These analyses comprise a nearly direct replication of previous work, adding novel analyses. Taken together, the original and replicated study may show evidence consistent with a general practice of women taking into account local economic factors, in marital surname decision-making." Inter-racial dynamics doubtless play a part in this too"