Link Dump

The Six Weeks of Halloween is fast approaching, so here’s a final clearing of the baffles before we descend into horror:

• The Gig Economy – At first I thought this was a non-fiction commentary on the gig economy, but it quickly becomes clear that this is not the case. It’s still a very interesting little piece of internets ephemera, well worth checking out. It actually reminded me of a modern, technology focused version of the opening of Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show, in which a postal worker assigned to the dead letters office finds patterns in the lost letters. This story posits anonymous gig contracts online, and it turns out that there are patterns to be discovered in the nonsense. An interesting story and might even make good Hugo award fodder (it’s probably better than 99% of recent Hugo short stories).
• Halloween 1978 (The Inside Story) – A Halloween documentary I hadn’t seen before? Ok, fine.
• The Web Design Museum – A blast from the past. We’ve come a long way…
• Survivorship bias – The notion that focusing on survivors of a given tragedy can distort conclusions; the military example is a good one:
  

  During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. Researchers from the Center for Naval Analyses had conducted a study of the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions, and had recommended that armor be added to the areas that showed the most damage. Wald noted that the study only considered the aircraft that had survived their missions—the bombers that had been shot down were not present for the damage assessment. The holes in the returning aircraft, then, represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still return home safely. Wald proposed that the Navy reinforce areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, since those were the areas that, if hit, would cause the plane to be lost. His work is considered seminal in the then-fledgling discipline of operational research.

• Fan Fiction Friday: Hogwarts and a Giant Squid in “First Encounter” – Warning, you probably don’t want to read this. More adventurous readers who are not scared of what the internet can throw at them probably don’t want to read this either. I didn’t particularly want to read it, but someone sent it to me and once I started, I couldn’t stop. I used to save all sorts of interesting links on del.icio.us and I had this tag called idontknowwhatthefuckisgoingonhere that I would use to categorize stuff like this. Unfortunately, I kinda do know what’s going on here, and it’s pretty gross.

That’s all for now. Stay frosty people, 6WH starts next Sunday.