Cuttings: March 2014

If religion exists to make raids into what is unsayable, musicians penetrate further than most - Giles Fraser's "Loose Cannon" column. “The best theologians are musicians. And Christianity is always better sung than said. To the extent that all religion exists to make raids into what is unsayable, the musicians penetrate further than most…. All of which is why it is such a mistake that the church is selling off its best family silver by increasingly cutting its cathedral choirs….This isn't something that ought to be a concern simply for the religious. When the National Gallery seeks to save a painting for the nation, Richard Dawkins doesn't protest that it's a painting of St John or a depiction of the crucifixion – or, at least, I don't think he does. Even those who don't do God generally get the value of cathedral choirs. Let's protect them.”

Hidden hatred: What makes people assassinate their own character online, sometimes driving themselves to suicide? - article in The Independent, referenced in Mind Hacks blog. “Why would anyone post dozens of fake messages of abuse about themselves on a social media website?... In the pantheon of attention-seeking disorders, self-trolling has much in common with self-harming and self-starving….As a therapist, I think we're confronted by people in severe distress feeling insecurely attached to parents, guardians and peers. As a result, mental processing remains juvenile whatever their biological stage. Their sense of personal identity seems fluid, fragile or miscalculated (one reason to denounce yourself in public is to conduct a rather risky opinion poll). Fantasy becomes reality – it's notable that some of the American students in the study came to believe that they'd been trolled for real just because their own words in print said that they had.”

Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword - article from the Nielsen / Norman Group. “Improve page scannability by using links that are easily noticeable and understandable. First, don’t make users hunt around the page in search for clickable elements. Second, don’t force users to read the text surrounding a link to determine where it leads. This is both time consuming and frustrating. Helpful links are visually distinct from the body text and specific to the page or document that they refer to.”

The perils of feedback - Oliver Burkeman's "This column will change your life" column. “Too many managers muddle three types of feedback, write Stone and Heen: appreciation (praise for accomplishments), coaching (tips for improvement) and evaluation (rating someone's performance, especially relative to others). At the least, they argue, companies using formal reviews should separate those three into different sessions. “

The truth about lobbying: 10 ways big business controls government - article in The Guardian by Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell. 1. Control the ground. 2. Spin the media. 3. Engineer a following. 4. Buy in credibility. 5. Sponsor a thinktank. 6. Consult your critics. 7. Neutralise the opposition. 8. Control the web. 9. Open the door. 10. And finally…

There and Back Again: A Packet’s Tale. How Does the Internet Work? - video referenced in John Naughten’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The video lets you ride shotgun with a packet of data—one of trillions involved in the trillions of Internet interactions that happen every second. Look deep beneath the surface of the most basic Internet transaction, and follow the packet as it flows from your fingertips, through circuits, wires, and cables, to a host server, and then back again, all in less than a second. “

What's so funny about peace, love and Starship? - Dave Eggers article in The Guardian. “I tried to think of a time when I'd seen so many people so happy all at once.... Most of what we do is wrong, we have to admit this – most of what we do is utterly wrong. We make colossal blunders, then small corrections, then more mistakes, more small corrections. Sometimes we learn, usually we don't. But then every so often we create a little joy. Every so often someone creates a perfect pop song, and then people can come and hear it being played, even in an Native American casino built on land stolen and restolen over and over again, by a band far past its creative prime, simply because if they do, before we are too old to do so, before we all die, before the United States crumbles in on itself, people will forget all our mistakes, national and personal, for a second or two, and will dance our ugly selves stupid."