- Bodging an outboard motor.
- Dan Knights studies gut bacteria and health in wild and captive primates.
- Other research suggests gut microbiome modulates mental illness.
- NNAs aka First Nationeers are privileged in their rights but still regularly jerked around by the Feds at the US border
- I often quote clips from Office Space - here's a retrospective by cast members.
- Penny Chisholm is one of The Blob's Wimmin in Science. Here she is talking about her microbes
- brmmmm: seeing issues with driverless cars; not so simple
- For your eating pleasure:
- zombie pie-crust
- Philly cheesesteak looks like something you'd scrape off
your shoea griddle - More than you ever want to know about comparative cheesesteak
- WTF is cheez whiz? A long way from cheese this was r'ared.
- We were at Brú na Bóinne droning ancient marks in the landscape. Here's a WWII sign recently exposed by fire on Bray Head
- Cruises [prevs]: about 20 million starts a year; of which 200 die at sea; and 10 go MIA never to be seen again
- End of days shelters under the streets of Helsinki
- Insider's view of the California fires: prevention beats fighting.
Sunday, 12 August 2018
Sunday Misc 12AUG18
The peculiar collection of strange bed-fellows which are jostling for attention in my 'mind' this week.
Saturday, 11 August 2018
Hugh the Painter
Despite the non-overlapping magisteria, you can respect scholarship even if it adheres to different standards than your own. The scientific method is A way of knowing what makes the world tick, but science is really not much help with compassion, intuition, dance or painting. Lera Boroditsky suggests that maybe the best way to understand how people tick is to read Jane Austen. Now here's a statement "A small advantage of inquiring into the history of almost a thousand years ago is that one is permitted to speculate on possibilities without necessarily having any evidence beyond reasonable plausibility". Harrumph, with those rules you can never be wrong, but it doesn't matter so much if you are. Although I suppose you could imagine a scenario where an ancient manuscript is re-interpreted to allow polygamy among Christians which sets off a jihad led by people who firmly believe that only followers of The Prophet are allowed that extra expense. That's not to claim that my science has been 'useful' but in general science is more open ended than historical research. There's a lot more to know about Isopods than Isaiah, for example and let that be a lesson to you when picking your specialist subject on Mastermind.
That sketchy statement about low standards of evidence is clipped from a great fat tome Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel, published by Penguin in 2016. It's more that 600 pages long including 50 pages of notes and references in minute font with few line-breaks and no white space. It's like suddenly the price of paper rocketted but all the notes were deemed essential. The manuscripts are literally that - written by hand on parchment hundreds of years ago before Gutenberg and Caxton started making identical copies of books. Whatever about paper at Penguin today, parchment was hard to come by, therefore expensive, and not the sort of stuff you'd crumple into a ball and throw into the bin if you made a mistake. Each piece was made from a single bit of animal skin: de-haired; scraped of fat and connective tissue, soaked in various noxious substances and then strrrrretched on a frame to dry out. While stretched, the hide was scraped to remove any remaining gunk, but also to reduce the thickness of the sheet. Under tension, a little nick in the skin was likely to open out into a gaping wound. This sort of damage is found, even in the best quality illuminated manuscripts, but repaired with a neat line of cross-stitch.
However much the raw product cost, the parchments, which have come to the attention of Christopher de Hamel after 500 to 1,500 years, have had their value immensely increased by their decoration. Hundreds of hours of painstaking writing with a quill pen, not to mention the illustrations. In my late teens, I wrote out pages and pages of poetry, so I know that you can get in the zone with the lettering and that it is quicker to write neatly than be scraggy. But the art work would be beyond me. The picture above is one of the very first self-portraits: the red letters on either side of the monks head say hu -- go | pic -- tor. We know that, as well as the illustrating, Hugo also wrote the text. Not least from the picture itself, where Hugo shows himself dipping a quill in an ink-horn with one hand and scoring a page with parallel lines with the other.
The book in which this delightful insight appears is a commentary on the book of Isaiah by St Jerome currently residing in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. If you look carefully at the book, you'll notice that it's written with 4 different hands. Actually if you or I looked at the book until cross-eyed we probably wouldn't make this inference, but de Hamel has been in the ancient manuscript business for more than 40 years. Appraising them for 25 years in the last century for London auctioneer Sotheby's and since 2000 as Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He has ‘ . . . probably catalogued more medieval manuscripts than anyone alive,or indeed than anyone has ever done.’ With that embedding he can recognise the important diagnostic variants, so he could put a credible date and author on whatever came across his desk and write catalogue notes that would put the find in context and sell-it-up by association with other famous old books. Dates are inferred from the content: there is an up-tick in calendars flagging St Thomas's Day only after Thomas à Becket was murdered. At the other end, it's rather difficult to sponsor a book and get acknowledged with a grateful thanks if you are dead. But dates are also inferred from the style: up until 1230 monks wrote above the lines they scored on the page; after that date they started the text under the top line. This fashion swept through Europe in a handful of years. Provenance can also be tied down to distinctive differences in hand-writing: there is an English style of lettering and several variants of continental which experts can recognise.
The Commentaries on Isaiah is now in Oxford but it was earlier catalogued in Exeter but not made there: the style is wrong and the hand is not English. Which hand? Well none of them are English and only one of them is Hugo's. Which? If you start making one assumption (rather than getting out a Ouija Board and asking Hugo's spirit) that all the pictures are by Hugo because he was The Whizz when it came to the colour supplement. Then notice that the earlier folios have been lettered first leaving a space for an illuminated initial (and a note specifying what that initial should be). In the last sections of the book the designs are integrated with the letters; rather than shoe-horned into a space written by someone else. This is nowhere better shown than on the page including the selfie [L], the last page in the book, where Hugo is neatly tucked into and integrated with the zig-zag pattern with which he has chosen to wrap his masterpiece.
I'll give another example of how encyclopedic knowledge, perseverance and luck can fish a candle out of the darkness. de Hamel is in Denmark consulting the Copenhagen Psalter from ?1160?. On one of the blank pages in the prayer book, someone has compiled a list of holy relics: Reliquiarum enumeratio:
The first line starts tantalizingly with Has reliquias possidet [these relics are owned by] and the rest of the line has been scraped clean. If you could only identify the owner - presumably a Nob who will have some kind of historical presence - you can not only date the list and hence the psalter, but get a clue as to where it was stored when Lord Blanko had the list compiled on a convenient page in the same room as the bits and bobs. But the line hasn't been erased as well as intented: you can make out the letters with ascenders -bdfhl- and as importantly text with no ascenders. The first three letters can be made out as d[omi]n[u]s = dns, so Lord Blanko not King Nullo nor Bsp Halo; all you have after that is some ascenders and a lot of spacer-letters and it's all in medieval Latin. It's as if you saw this at the top of the page.
If your life depended on it and you had 20 minutes you could probably work out whose name has been scrorched out by a jealous blogger. de Hamel's solution to his erasure is dns uualdemarus apud ringsta[dium] = Lord Waldemar [the Great] at Ringsted.
Ah go on, get Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts out of the library, you'll feel much cleverer after reading a couple of chapters.
That sketchy statement about low standards of evidence is clipped from a great fat tome Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel, published by Penguin in 2016. It's more that 600 pages long including 50 pages of notes and references in minute font with few line-breaks and no white space. It's like suddenly the price of paper rocketted but all the notes were deemed essential. The manuscripts are literally that - written by hand on parchment hundreds of years ago before Gutenberg and Caxton started making identical copies of books. Whatever about paper at Penguin today, parchment was hard to come by, therefore expensive, and not the sort of stuff you'd crumple into a ball and throw into the bin if you made a mistake. Each piece was made from a single bit of animal skin: de-haired; scraped of fat and connective tissue, soaked in various noxious substances and then strrrrretched on a frame to dry out. While stretched, the hide was scraped to remove any remaining gunk, but also to reduce the thickness of the sheet. Under tension, a little nick in the skin was likely to open out into a gaping wound. This sort of damage is found, even in the best quality illuminated manuscripts, but repaired with a neat line of cross-stitch.
The book in which this delightful insight appears is a commentary on the book of Isaiah by St Jerome currently residing in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. If you look carefully at the book, you'll notice that it's written with 4 different hands. Actually if you or I looked at the book until cross-eyed we probably wouldn't make this inference, but de Hamel has been in the ancient manuscript business for more than 40 years. Appraising them for 25 years in the last century for London auctioneer Sotheby's and since 2000 as Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He has ‘ . . . probably catalogued more medieval manuscripts than anyone alive,or indeed than anyone has ever done.’ With that embedding he can recognise the important diagnostic variants, so he could put a credible date and author on whatever came across his desk and write catalogue notes that would put the find in context and sell-it-up by association with other famous old books. Dates are inferred from the content: there is an up-tick in calendars flagging St Thomas's Day only after Thomas à Becket was murdered. At the other end, it's rather difficult to sponsor a book and get acknowledged with a grateful thanks if you are dead. But dates are also inferred from the style: up until 1230 monks wrote above the lines they scored on the page; after that date they started the text under the top line. This fashion swept through Europe in a handful of years. Provenance can also be tied down to distinctive differences in hand-writing: there is an English style of lettering and several variants of continental which experts can recognise.
I'll give another example of how encyclopedic knowledge, perseverance and luck can fish a candle out of the darkness. de Hamel is in Denmark consulting the Copenhagen Psalter from ?1160?. On one of the blank pages in the prayer book, someone has compiled a list of holy relics: Reliquiarum enumeratio:
Ah go on, get Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts out of the library, you'll feel much cleverer after reading a couple of chapters.
Friday, 10 August 2018
Two half ideas is a solution
It's very quiet at The Institute: all the lecturers are away on their 2 month vacation. Any graduate students under their supervision are no long supervised and (therefore) not present. In my day, I worked from dawn to dusk in Summer and from full dark to full dark in Winter. There was always stuff to be done even if the Boss was distracted, which was often because he many interests. Last Thursday, I was invited to a session with two of our Effectives - Eff.I and Eff.II - who were on campus because they also realise that stuff has to be done or the project will stagnate, they personally will learn nothing and their years in further-further education will be wasted.
One of the research groups has sequenced the genomes of a couple of soil bacteria which seem to have something interesting, and with commercial potential, in their biochemical toolbox. It doesn't matter what it is: the bugs could sequester heavy metals like cadmium or convert ethanol into single malt whiskey or make a fabulous new antibiotic. Eff.I has been tasked with searching the chunks of DNA which have come back from the sequencing company for bits which are similar to known enzymes involved the biochemical pathway of interest. He's learning to program in Python because that is the majority language for bioinformatics this year. In my day it was Perl. You cannot learn programming as a disembodied hobby: you must have a task that needs doing which can only be carried out by coding. It's also really difficult to learn how to write code all on your own. When I was going for my PhD, I wrote Fortran to calculate and print genetic distance GD matrices. I was the only coder in the Biology Department, so I had nobody to help, it was hard graft and not much fun and took me a long time. But it sure beat calculating GDs with a pocket calculator because the matrix grew to include 35 populations and 35 * (35-1) = 1190 separate pairwise GDs to calculate. It was a problem that 'scaled up' if you could code it. Luckily Eff.I has met Eff.II [thanks to matchmaker me] who did a research project with me last year and is now doing work experience in UCD. Because that internship is mostly coding, he spends most days 'working from home' also learning Python, round the corner from The Institute.
We met in a quiet part of the concourse at one of those tables with one leg shorter than the others. Eff.I showed us his code <whooof - over the head> and started to talk jargon which Eff.II was making a better fist than me of understanding. We were on firmer ground when Eff.I showed us some graphs which his code had generated: they weren't pretty and were even a little bit confusing but we could see the results and could then discuss how they could be made more fit-for-purpose. That purpose being to show Eff.I's computer-illiterate bosses that he was getting down with some of the data. Eff.II was able to share some fragments of his code that might produce a better, more informative picture.
While they were talking shop, I got up and rootled through the nearest wastebin for a bit of cardboard to wedge under the wonky table leg. I may be quite long-in-the-tooth and out of practice with the software but hardware I can bodge with the best of them. Viva la bricolage!
One of the research groups has sequenced the genomes of a couple of soil bacteria which seem to have something interesting, and with commercial potential, in their biochemical toolbox. It doesn't matter what it is: the bugs could sequester heavy metals like cadmium or convert ethanol into single malt whiskey or make a fabulous new antibiotic. Eff.I has been tasked with searching the chunks of DNA which have come back from the sequencing company for bits which are similar to known enzymes involved the biochemical pathway of interest. He's learning to program in Python because that is the majority language for bioinformatics this year. In my day it was Perl. You cannot learn programming as a disembodied hobby: you must have a task that needs doing which can only be carried out by coding. It's also really difficult to learn how to write code all on your own. When I was going for my PhD, I wrote Fortran to calculate and print genetic distance GD matrices. I was the only coder in the Biology Department, so I had nobody to help, it was hard graft and not much fun and took me a long time. But it sure beat calculating GDs with a pocket calculator because the matrix grew to include 35 populations and 35 * (35-1) = 1190 separate pairwise GDs to calculate. It was a problem that 'scaled up' if you could code it. Luckily Eff.I has met Eff.II [thanks to matchmaker me] who did a research project with me last year and is now doing work experience in UCD. Because that internship is mostly coding, he spends most days 'working from home' also learning Python, round the corner from The Institute.
We met in a quiet part of the concourse at one of those tables with one leg shorter than the others. Eff.I showed us his code <whooof - over the head> and started to talk jargon which Eff.II was making a better fist than me of understanding. We were on firmer ground when Eff.I showed us some graphs which his code had generated: they weren't pretty and were even a little bit confusing but we could see the results and could then discuss how they could be made more fit-for-purpose. That purpose being to show Eff.I's computer-illiterate bosses that he was getting down with some of the data. Eff.II was able to share some fragments of his code that might produce a better, more informative picture.
While they were talking shop, I got up and rootled through the nearest wastebin for a bit of cardboard to wedge under the wonky table leg. I may be quite long-in-the-tooth and out of practice with the software but hardware I can bodge with the best of them. Viva la bricolage!
After PhD
"A PhD is nature's way of making another PhD"
Bobby Sox
The 2014 Mentor of the Year retweeted a tweet by the Wellcome Trust about a piece in Nature about options during and after a rite of PhDassage which people make so that their mothers can address them as Doctor. The Nature article is written by Philipp Kruger who is a PhD student in immunology at the University of Oxford, UK. Kruger is doing okay in his PhD: he's got a 2016 paper in PNAS [good - Impact Factor 9.7] which has only been cited 12 times [not so good]; and another in EMBO MolMed [also good Impact Factor 9.5] cited 27 times [better]. Bear in mind that the average number of citations accruing to a paper is less than 1.On the basis of call no man happy until he is dead [attrib Herodotus, Solon, Sophocles, Voltaire, Darth Vader] we can discount most of the advice given by Master [MSc, 2014, U.Oxford] Kruger. Maybe I bridle a bit at youthful earnestness. Getting the attention of potentially everyone in science with his piece in Nature could be the beginning of a new career in science journalism . . . or a once off. In 1986, I earned nearly £1,000 writing up my PhD research in two popular science magazines. At the time my day job was pulling in £8,000 a year, so that was a nice little earner. But it was also a flash in the pan: I never earned another cent writing popular science - least of all on The Blob.
But I'll tell ya this: using a PhD as a means to get somewhere else is an entirely foolish and fatuous endeavour. It takes years; you earn buttons while at it; it qualifies you for nothing specific or one thing that is too specific; and most post-PhD academic jobs are woefully paid compared to what you can get in the real world. A significant proportion of PhD candidates have a dreadful time: abusive supervisor, competitive colleagues, long hours, many wrong turnings. But if you're lucky, you can have a whale of a time: you'll never know as much as you do on the night you proof-read the final draft of your thesis. More widely, nobody on the planet will know more than you about your section of the coal-face at that time [see Jocelyn Bell Burnell].
The math is unforgiving: IF your only role model is your PhD supervisor so his/her job becomes your most coveted aspiration THEN you are likely to be disappointed. Since the 1960s there has been no huge increase in Faculty positions in colleges, so a steady state of opportunities is a good approximation. Your boss will be in the business for about 30 years, nurturing [or indeed abusing and exploiting] between 15 and 60 PhD students. Only one of them can inherit the mantle: the chance that it is you is thus between 2% and 5%. I don't limit the equation to such an incestuous inheritance, At steady state, there will be Faculty positions coming vacant when you graduate even if your boss is still 20 years from retirement. But the maths says that 98% or 95% of people with PhDs won't retire, having in their own turn supervised, cared for, educated and inspired a family of PhD students. It is absurd to say, or even think, all those PhDs who went and did something else are failures or have wasted their time.
In an ideal world you'd learn all you need to know in the Who Am I? department by the time you leave college with a first degree. Heck, if you haven't been infantilised by your parents you could have figured that out before you leave high-school. But home and high-school is a very narrow purview unless your Mammy was in the diplomatic corps and you got to see the world. You'll never know you're meant to be slotted in a tasty barrel if you've never left Omaha "No Waves Here" Nebraska. My advice is to get the widest possible experience as you grow up: try a lot of things and you're more likely to find your best fit. If you sign up for a PhD with the person who supervised your final year research project, you show a lamentable want of imagination and ambition.
Look at me, that's what I did; but at least I followed my mentor back across the Atlantic. In Boston University, I discovered a whole new world of science. I had been given to believe that I knew all there was to know about Genetics when I left TCD. How wrong that was. I learned a whole lot about fields of science that were not even mentioned during my first degree: the ediacaran fauna; brownies; neogene hominid teeth; the tragedy of the commons; TGIF; the history of colonial New England; humpback whales; diners; The Azores; multiple regression with dummy variables. The actual PhD project was so specialised, so much without utility, so peculiar as to be a dead-end. But it wasn't: in graduate school I was encouraged to think, given space to think, forced to integrate disparate data, allowed to make mistakes. The firing crucible of the process made me what I am and has kept me off the streets with my knees under a desk (except when I was retiring again) for the last 35 years. Maybe I was lucky, but maybe I made my own luck.
Thursday, 9 August 2018
Local girl makes goods
Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith was born on 9th August 1878 - 140 years ago today - in Brownswood House just south of Enniscorthy, Co Wexford - our nearest bus-stop. Her family, like mine in King's County, were well-heeled horse-riding protesants. When Eileen was a teenager, her mother became the Baroness Gray by inheritance and the family adopted this style as their surname. She was, like m'daughters, largely home-educated; although we couldn't afford a series of governesses and Dau.I and Dau.II had to shift for themselves in the book learning. With the turn of the new century Gray went all bohemian to the Slade arts school in London and eventually moved to France where she was a leading light - and knew everyone - in modern design: she was mainly in the furniture and carpets department.
The Patriarchy Le Corbusier “act of naked phallocracy” by a man asserting “his dominion, like a urinating dog, over the territory”. hmmmm, I'd better wash the rugs, so. Her next house after she split with Badovici was called Tempe à Pailla which is also replete with hidden meaning: a local Provençal proverb holds that "time and hay are needed for the figs to split open". Oh fie, I know no where to look, I blush.
Far too much of quirky interest and rabbit-hole connexions to cover in a single tributary Blob - but here are 98 threads to follow on your own time.
- Top L - the bibendum chair supposedly inspired by the Michelin Man [which prev]
- available in 10 weeks in wool or leather in any colour you want for £2,600
- Top Mid - E-1027 multi-function table: it is height adjustable; can act as an occasional table to support a single red rose in a vase OR you can get your knees under it to write a letter or eat oeufs benedict.
- available now [instant gratification] for £600
- Top R - Fauteuil aux Dragons a once-off made 100 years ago for Susanne Talbot and later owned by Yves Saint Laurent.
- Sorry you can't afford this one - it last sold at Christie's for €20million in 2009
- Bot L - Castellar rug - you may think it's better to hang the thing on the wall rather than walk on it in gumboots because
- it costs £2,000 and needs 5 months to make
- Bot R - Blue Marine rug
- a bit cheaper at £1,750 and available now.
Far too much of quirky interest and rabbit-hole connexions to cover in a single tributary Blob - but here are 98 threads to follow on your own time.
Wednesday, 8 August 2018
Pilipina OptiMax
If you think that Bangalore is the call centre capital of the world, you are sooo yesterday and I need to update your racial stereotypes. Because, the person at the other end of the line is most likely to have been speaking Tagalog with the kids at breakfast. That's business process outsourcing (BPO) and it employs more than a million call centre operatives in the Philippines. That's 1% of the total [105million!] population including pensioners and infants. Apparently, the speak better, accent-neutral, English than elsewhere in the poor world.
If you're working for buttons in a call centre in Luzon or Manila and you have ambition to do better for your family, you might decide to take your fully-trained telephone manner to your cousin's garage and start your own business. Call centres do two quite different things. Either a) waiting for the orders or complaints to come in or b) cold calling an endless list of numbers trying to sell something that the callee doesn't yet know they need.
Empresa a) is subject to optimization: the company want to employ the fewest people [at the lowest wage] so that the customer is not made to wait an unacceptably long time. I'm sure that, in the instant gratification world, the time we are prepared to wait on hold listening to Greensleeves is diminishing. But you defo don't want to have your employees looking at the ceiling or chatting among themselves. Presumably the big places run on shifts because there are people awake 24/7 somewhere in the world. And I guess that more people come into work when the USA starts to wake up and finds their Amazon parcel hasn't arrived or they need a new smartphone. And there should be a hierarchy on the floor, beginners handling the routine calls; more experienced workers dealing with the rarer or more technical problems [thank you for your call, we value your custom, I am transferring you to technical support]; and I imagine that there are hard-nosed people who can take anger, contempt and abuse without losing sleep about it. I wrote before about choosing a nom-de-call, like Attracta Looney, so that you could leave the work at work
With Empresa b) you want, rather, to maximise the return on your investment in cold-caller salary. One way must be to set targets and identify an Earner-of-the-Week and let go those who consistently fail to deliver the fish. Two factors here 1) efficiency of the operatives = how many successful calls per billable hour 2) the cost per operative. The second factor is why there are fewer call centres are operating in Waterford - it's the minimum wage, silly.
I encountered the hierarchy on the cold call side this year, when I was set up by a 'junior employee' to talk to a 'penions expert'. That didn't turn out well for the Junior when his ambition sort of outstripped his ability.
Q. What's lowest form of life on the call centre payroll?
A. A robot!
Both His Blobbiness [self] and The Beloved have independently encountered one of these bottom feeders in the last week.
<Dring> <dring>
Hello
Your account with Eircom has been compromised, the sky is about to fall on your home, crushing your loved ones. Press 1 and we will protect you.
<drrrmmmmm>
That business model must work. Some people, a bit simple, or technophobic, or groggy with sleep, press 1 and tumble into a rabbit-hole down which we were both too afeared to venture. The responders must be fewer [the robovoice is the opposite of empathic] than for a personable and enthusiastic real person. But The Company isn't paying the robot; only the workers in the second circle of hell. I presume that the latter will be calmly asking for credit card details, PINs and passwords as the only way to stop the sky falling now. There is no illegal or exploitative activity going on wherever you live: that happens abroad.
If you're working for buttons in a call centre in Luzon or Manila and you have ambition to do better for your family, you might decide to take your fully-trained telephone manner to your cousin's garage and start your own business. Call centres do two quite different things. Either a) waiting for the orders or complaints to come in or b) cold calling an endless list of numbers trying to sell something that the callee doesn't yet know they need.
Empresa a) is subject to optimization: the company want to employ the fewest people [at the lowest wage] so that the customer is not made to wait an unacceptably long time. I'm sure that, in the instant gratification world, the time we are prepared to wait on hold listening to Greensleeves is diminishing. But you defo don't want to have your employees looking at the ceiling or chatting among themselves. Presumably the big places run on shifts because there are people awake 24/7 somewhere in the world. And I guess that more people come into work when the USA starts to wake up and finds their Amazon parcel hasn't arrived or they need a new smartphone. And there should be a hierarchy on the floor, beginners handling the routine calls; more experienced workers dealing with the rarer or more technical problems [thank you for your call, we value your custom, I am transferring you to technical support]; and I imagine that there are hard-nosed people who can take anger, contempt and abuse without losing sleep about it. I wrote before about choosing a nom-de-call, like Attracta Looney, so that you could leave the work at work
With Empresa b) you want, rather, to maximise the return on your investment in cold-caller salary. One way must be to set targets and identify an Earner-of-the-Week and let go those who consistently fail to deliver the fish. Two factors here 1) efficiency of the operatives = how many successful calls per billable hour 2) the cost per operative. The second factor is why there are fewer call centres are operating in Waterford - it's the minimum wage, silly.
I encountered the hierarchy on the cold call side this year, when I was set up by a 'junior employee' to talk to a 'penions expert'. That didn't turn out well for the Junior when his ambition sort of outstripped his ability.
Q. What's lowest form of life on the call centre payroll?
A. A robot!
Both His Blobbiness [self] and The Beloved have independently encountered one of these bottom feeders in the last week.
<Dring> <dring>
Hello
Your account with Eircom has been compromised, the sky is about to fall on your home, crushing your loved ones. Press 1 and we will protect you.
<drrrmmmmm>
That business model must work. Some people, a bit simple, or technophobic, or groggy with sleep, press 1 and tumble into a rabbit-hole down which we were both too afeared to venture. The responders must be fewer [the robovoice is the opposite of empathic] than for a personable and enthusiastic real person. But The Company isn't paying the robot; only the workers in the second circle of hell. I presume that the latter will be calmly asking for credit card details, PINs and passwords as the only way to stop the sky falling now. There is no illegal or exploitative activity going on wherever you live: that happens abroad.
Tuesday, 7 August 2018
Vrooooome
My sporting life has mostly been Advanced Sofa. I do remember, however, sitting through the entire Tour de France 1976. I spend July and August that year watching hexagons of drought forming in the fields outside Wageningen, NL, where I was an intern at Strichting voor Plantenveredeling = The Plant Breeding Institute. It didn't rain for the whole of July. I stayed at the International Agriculture Centre which was a bit like a clean-but-functional hotel and a bit like an up-market hostel where all the visiting scientists were billetted. The IAC is now the WICC and quite a bit fancier than in my day. No Friendface or Netflix or laptops back then; in the evening it was either watch TV downstairs or stay in my room reading De Hobbit with a NL-EN dictionary. There were other channels but the overwhelming majority wanted to see the highlights on The Tour every night. Belgian Lucien van Impe [R wearing the maillot à pois rouges for winning yet another mountain stage] won that year. The doping scandals epitomised by Lance Armstrong were 20 years in the future and now 20 years in the past but they still lower over cycling.
My years of actual cycling were distinctly unsexy: when I worked in Dublin in the 90s, I cycled about 25km a day tooling in and out of work. That clocks up to about the circumference of the world between 1990 and my RTA in 1997. My thighs were mighty in those days. If you have a TV and/or you're Welsh, you will have heard that Geraint Thomas [who he?] from Cardiff who won The Tour this year. He should really be competing in the Special Olympics because he had his spleen removed after destroying it in a spectacular crash in 2005. His main rival in the TdF this year was Chris Froome, an Englishman who has the same MegaCorp sponsor as Thomas in Team Sky. Froome won the Maillot jaune in '17, '16, '15 and '13. Amazing really because Froome also has a handicap - he's got the asthma. There are a helluva lot of sporty types who have asthma [6% at the Beijing Olympics] apparently, which is intrinsically surprising, no? I had asthma when I was a nipper, couldn't run 800m because I ran out of puff and had to walk for a bit after the first circuit of the track. I was fast over 100m and faster over 80m hurdles so I could have been a contender but the asthma just diverted me into other ways of being and I only really participated in sports as a joke. Not so Chris Froome who doesn't coast downhill but piles it on down:
Q. Why would you want to use Salbutamol if you weren't really asthmatic?
A. Because the drug acts as β2 adrenergic receptor agonist, relaxing the smooth muscles of the bronchioles and allowing you thereby to whoop more air into your lungs when they really want to shut down in a spasm of exercised-induced asthma EIA.
During the Vuelta a España last year, which Froome won, WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency took a urine sample from him which was about 2x over the threshold [which is 1000ng/ml or rather 1200ng/ml because WADA adds 200ng 'for luck' to arbitrarily raise the bar in favour of the athlete] for Salbutamol metabolic products. Accordingly, the Union Cycliste Internationale UCI declared an "Adverse Analytical Finding" (AAF) and stripped him of his medal. Froome and his backers - Team Sky and every person who ever waved a Union Flag - declared stoutly that he had done nothing wrong and the AAF didn't take into account dehydration, and started an appeal process. This response reminds me uncomfortably of how The Patriarchy talks very loud about due process and the presumption of innocence when celebrity males are accused of molesting women. Froome is now rich, Team Sky yet richer, and they can get the best lawyers, pharmawhizzes and publicists to make the best possible case.
Froome apparently submitted a 1500 page report to convince himself that there was sufficient doubt that his urine sample was over the limit. I say 'apparently' because the report is not being released for scrutiny by the public. A month ago on 2nd July 2018, the UCI caved in and closed down Froome's case; effectively exonerating him. WADA acknowledges that everyone is different, and that there could be people who have a physiology which breaks down a normal therapeutic dose <puff> in a peculiar way so the urine sample looks like <puff><puff><puff><puff>. The urine sample is, in any case, a single snapshot even if divided into an A and B bottle. What WADA recommends is a controlled pharmacokinetic PK regime whereby the suspect is allowed to reproduce their 'normal usage' under controlled conditions and show that <voilà> this results in a AAF. That's a lot of work even if you were going to do such a study on lab rats, you can't easily replicate Froome's circumstances immediately before and after stage 18 of La Vuelta last year. You can't even remember what you ate for lunch last Tuesday. Whatever: the UCI waived that requirement in this case. You can bet your sweet bippy that the next perp in a doping scandal is going to have her lawyers subpoena Froome's submission because it appears to be powerful magic.
The current issue of Br J Clin Pharmacol has a timely and relevant report out of Centre for Human Drug Research, Leiden: Futility of current urine salbutamol doping control. Title says it all!
My years of actual cycling were distinctly unsexy: when I worked in Dublin in the 90s, I cycled about 25km a day tooling in and out of work. That clocks up to about the circumference of the world between 1990 and my RTA in 1997. My thighs were mighty in those days. If you have a TV and/or you're Welsh, you will have heard that Geraint Thomas [who he?] from Cardiff who won The Tour this year. He should really be competing in the Special Olympics because he had his spleen removed after destroying it in a spectacular crash in 2005. His main rival in the TdF this year was Chris Froome, an Englishman who has the same MegaCorp sponsor as Thomas in Team Sky. Froome won the Maillot jaune in '17, '16, '15 and '13. Amazing really because Froome also has a handicap - he's got the asthma. There are a helluva lot of sporty types who have asthma [6% at the Beijing Olympics] apparently, which is intrinsically surprising, no? I had asthma when I was a nipper, couldn't run 800m because I ran out of puff and had to walk for a bit after the first circuit of the track. I was fast over 100m and faster over 80m hurdles so I could have been a contender but the asthma just diverted me into other ways of being and I only really participated in sports as a joke. Not so Chris Froome who doesn't coast downhill but piles it on down:
Étape 8 (Pau / Bagnères-de-Luchon) - Tour de France 2016
There is, therefore, a teeny suspicion that all those asthmatic cyclists are gaming the system by pulling-a-sickie in order to access salbutamol inhalers. Salbutamol inhalers are allowed in sport in order to level the playing-field for asthmatics by equilibrating upwards, like the EU, rather than give one athlete an unfair advantage over their competitors. In order to use an inhaler you have to apply for a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) signed off by your doctor AND keep your use below a certain threshold.Q. Why would you want to use Salbutamol if you weren't really asthmatic?
A. Because the drug acts as β2 adrenergic receptor agonist, relaxing the smooth muscles of the bronchioles and allowing you thereby to whoop more air into your lungs when they really want to shut down in a spasm of exercised-induced asthma EIA.
During the Vuelta a España last year, which Froome won, WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency took a urine sample from him which was about 2x over the threshold [which is 1000ng/ml or rather 1200ng/ml because WADA adds 200ng 'for luck' to arbitrarily raise the bar in favour of the athlete] for Salbutamol metabolic products. Accordingly, the Union Cycliste Internationale UCI declared an "Adverse Analytical Finding" (AAF) and stripped him of his medal. Froome and his backers - Team Sky and every person who ever waved a Union Flag - declared stoutly that he had done nothing wrong and the AAF didn't take into account dehydration, and started an appeal process. This response reminds me uncomfortably of how The Patriarchy talks very loud about due process and the presumption of innocence when celebrity males are accused of molesting women. Froome is now rich, Team Sky yet richer, and they can get the best lawyers, pharmawhizzes and publicists to make the best possible case.
Froome apparently submitted a 1500 page report to convince himself that there was sufficient doubt that his urine sample was over the limit. I say 'apparently' because the report is not being released for scrutiny by the public. A month ago on 2nd July 2018, the UCI caved in and closed down Froome's case; effectively exonerating him. WADA acknowledges that everyone is different, and that there could be people who have a physiology which breaks down a normal therapeutic dose <puff> in a peculiar way so the urine sample looks like <puff><puff><puff><puff>. The urine sample is, in any case, a single snapshot even if divided into an A and B bottle. What WADA recommends is a controlled pharmacokinetic PK regime whereby the suspect is allowed to reproduce their 'normal usage' under controlled conditions and show that <voilà> this results in a AAF. That's a lot of work even if you were going to do such a study on lab rats, you can't easily replicate Froome's circumstances immediately before and after stage 18 of La Vuelta last year. You can't even remember what you ate for lunch last Tuesday. Whatever: the UCI waived that requirement in this case. You can bet your sweet bippy that the next perp in a doping scandal is going to have her lawyers subpoena Froome's submission because it appears to be powerful magic.
The current issue of Br J Clin Pharmacol has a timely and relevant report out of Centre for Human Drug Research, Leiden: Futility of current urine salbutamol doping control. Title says it all!
TLAs this piece: AAF EIA IAC RTA TUE UCI
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