Cary Cooper speculates in Times Higher Education about how feverish loyalty to football clubs might be connected to the decline in long-term, linear careers, as fans seek to substitute for the stability and sense of mutual obligation that was once assocated with work:

“Another thing that I have observed about football is loyalty. In today’s world, there is less and less loyalty, particularly from our employers, as the psychological contract between employer and employee has been substantially eroded over the past two decades, a phenomenon that is getting much worse in these recessionary times.”

Link: Flickr’s Lomo Pool

Unsurprisingly, there’s a passionate group of Lomo photographers over at Flickr.  But there are issues of legitimacy and authenticity involved:  “Please, no fauxmos or digital lomos,” the group owners write.

Now, back to work.

Quadcamera turns your iPhone into a Lomo camera. Neat.

Two images.  The first is from the Speaker of the House (via).  The second is from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (link).  A great demonstration of how seemingly minor changes (the data series you choose; the visualization choices you make) come to bear on the conclusions you draw.

The first plots absolute job losses (in 1000s of jobs), for the current recession, the 1991 recession and the 2001 recession.

The second plots the unemployment rate, comparing the current recession to an average of 1991, 2001, 1973-75 and 1982-83.

Which years do you pick?  How do you measure unemployment?  Do you compare specific recessions or aggregate them?  Seemingly minor design choices with a serious bearing on your conclusions about the comparative severity of this recession.

“This recession has opened the nation’s eyes to its growing social inequalities. There is a whole population of workers who are outside the traditional support net.”

— Masahiro Abe, labour relations specialist at Dokkyo University, describing how Japan’s system of social welfare has failed to respond to the changes in the country’s economy and labour force.

Link: Teaching well at research-intensive schools: A “moral obligation”

Over at Orgtheory.net, Fabio Rojas describes five ways in which good teaching is a moral imperative.

Link: The Checklist: Saving Lives, Preventing Screwups

The WHO has found that simple, low-tech checklists can cut surgical deaths by a third.  The checklists ask simple, obvious questions that are often overlooked:  Do all the staff know what procedure is about to be performed?  Do they have the right patient’s chart?  Routinizing these simple questions, unsurprisingly, prevents screwups.

Web services outfit 37 Signals is putting the idea to work in their business.  Sure, the stakes are a little lower for web developers than surgeons, but the same principle applies:

“It’s the kind of stuff that we all know, but that we’ll often forget if we’re not being reminded about it in the moment. Thinking back to the mistakes we’ve made in the past, there are plenty of those that could have been avoided or caught much earlier if we had been using checklists.”

I could see this being useful in data analysis:  “Have I recoded my reverse-scored items?”, “Have I screened for out-of-range data?”, “Have I checked for multivariate outliers?”  The number of facepalm moments I could have avoided with a simple checklist…

At the University of Calgary, neurobiologist Samuel Weiss, who last year won a prestigious Gairdner Award for discovering the brain’s ability to make new cells, was struggling to understand why the budget offered no new money for research operating grants at Canada’s three federal funding agencies — the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the National Science and Engineering Research Council. The federal budget suggests these key granting agencies are to find $87.2-million in savings over the next three years.

‘The tri-council funding is the bedrock in advances in health and innovation,’ said Dr. Weiss, whose own work, now being tested in patients with spinal cord injuries, began in mice.

The government has invested in buildings and training bright people, he said, but ‘without operating money what are they going to do?'”

In a profligate budget filled with new spending, the cupboards are bare for scientific research, the Globe and Mail reports.

Addendum:  The priority on construction (to the neglect of research funding) makes even less sense when you consider Stephen Gordon’s evidence that there is very little slack in the Canadian construction sector.