Business, Technology

Australia’s ongoing online retail fiasco

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20 January 2014
3 min read
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The continuing inability of Myer and David Jones to deliver customers a decent online brand experience disqualifies them from complaining about digital competitors eating their lunch, argues Tim Burrowes.

All credit to Myer. It’s not many retailers who can make a Boxing Day sale last for three weeks.

But thanks to comments from unhappy customers on the company’s Facebook page, it is possible to monitor in real time the continuing erosion of brand value.

I must declare an interest here. I am myself an amused and bemused consumer of that online experience. Not that Myer’s main rival David Jones has done much better, but more on that later.

Being something of a misanthrope when it comes to bricks and mortar retail sales, I actually decided to give the stores’ online sales a shot.

As it will have been hard to miss, Myer’s site crashed within hours of its Christmas night launch and remained offline for the next eight days.

In a world where Google being down for eight seconds would be remarked upon, Australia’s biggest retail brand was down for eight days.

But most curious was how unconcerned Myer boss Bernie Brookes seemed.

The nice folk at partner IBM were hard at work fixing it, he told the market.

And online was, he reassured his investors, only responsible for about one per cent of the company’s revenues. Which doesn’t sound too bad until you wonder whether the fact that it’s only at one per cent is because the store hasn’t been doing enough to catch up with its competitors.

Still, when the Myer site came back, and lured by the offer of free delivery, I gave it a shot — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Politics, Rights, Technology

Turkish police fire tear gas, rubber bullets in protests against internet control, corruption

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20 January 2014
1 min read
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Riot police in Turkey have fired tear gas, rubber bullets and used water cannons on demonstrators in Istanbul and Ankara protesting against government plans to impose curbs on the internet.

Rights groups say the proposals, which were approved by parliament last week, amount to censorship and will increase government control of the internet.

Up to 2,000 protesters chanted government resign and all united against fascism at Istanbul’s Taksim Square, some of them hurling fireworks and stones at police.

Everywhere Taksim, everywhere resistance, they shouted, using the slogan of last June’s anti-government protests that first erupted in the square.

The demonstration was organised in protest at plans to impose curbs on the internet and over the graft scandal rocking the government.

It broke up after the police action without any immediate reports of injuries or arrests — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Science

Draff to dram: water cleanser created in chance study of whisky byproduct

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18 January 2014
2 min read
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A project to remove arsenic from groundwater in Bangladesh began by accident, when Dr Leigh Cassidy from Aberdeen University was working on technology to treat industrially contaminated water in the UK.

Cassidy, who was working on her Phd, thought draff, the residue of barley husks that is a byproduct of using grain in brewing alcohol products such as whisky, would act as a cleansing agent. The idea was brusquely dismissed by one colleague.

I was told ‘don’t be stupid it will never work’, Cassidy says. But someone else said to go ahead.

Cassidy did indeed go ahead, modifying the draff with a secret ingredient, transforming it into a cleansing agent. She is now credited as the inventor of the appropriately named Dram — she admits to trying to think of a clever name. Dram is short for device for the remediation and attenuation of multiple pollutants. Instead of using draff in Bangladesh, Dram will use local ingredients such as coconut shells or rice husks to act as the organic filter media that traps the arsenic.

The arsenic crisis in Bangladesh is considered by the World Health Organisation to be the largest mass poisoning of a population in human history. About 77 million people are at risk of arsenic poisoning despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in addressing the problem. One in five deaths in Bangladesh are due to arsenic poisoning — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Craft

Hexagonal Pewter Stool / Max Lamb

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17 January 2014
53 second read
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Hexagonal Pewter Stool from Max Lamb

Inspired by a childhood spent on the beaches of Cornwall building castles, boats and tunnels in the sand, I decided to return to my favourite beach at Caerhays on the south coast of Cornwall to produce a stool using a primitive form of sand-casting. Molten pewter was poured into a sand mould sculpted directly into the beach by hand, and once cooled the sand was dug away to reveal a pewter stool — via Vimeo

Craft, Wildlife

Cat Battle Armour / schnabuble

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17 January 2014
39 second read
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100% wearable, flexible, and comfortable, the Cat Battle Armour is an armour harness for your kitty. Completely hand-made from durable veg-tan leather, this is no mere costume piece. Your cat will become an unstoppable force for slaughter in this fully articulated suit, shielding him/her from foes while allowing unimpeded movement across the battlefield or living room floor — via Etsy

Food, Science

Snake oil Superfoods? / Information Is Beautiful

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15 January 2014
42 second read
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The team at Information is Beautiful have visualised the scientific evidence — or lack thereof — behind what they dub Snake Oil Superfoods, breaking down hard data in an infinitely clickable format. Each of the coloured bubbles on the page corresponds to a specific food, but also a specific claim; so, some edibles make multiple appearances on way opposite ends of the spectrum — via Gizmodo

Design

The Open-Office Trap

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13 January 2014
3 min read
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The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve. In June 1997, a large oil and gas company in western Canada asked a group of psychologists at the University of Calgary to monitor workers as they transitioned from a traditional office arrangement to an open one. The psychologists assessed the employees’ satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterwards. The employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, co-workers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell.

In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

Psychologically, the repercussions of open offices are relatively straightforward. Physical barriers have been closely linked to psychological privacy, and a sense of privacy boosts job performance. Open offices also remove an element of control, which can lead to feelings of helplessness. In a 2005 study that looked at organizations ranging from a Midwest auto supplier to a Southwest telecom firm, researchers found that the ability to control the environment had a significant effect on team cohesion and satisfaction. When workers couldn’t change the way that things looked, adjust the lighting and temperature, or choose how to conduct meetings, spirits plummeted — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Politics, Rights, Technology

Teen Reported to Police After Finding Security Hole in Website

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13 January 2014
3 min read
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A teenager in Australia who thought he was doing a good deed by reporting a security vulnerability in a government website was reported to the police.

Joshua Rogers, a 16-year-old in the state of Victoria, found a basic security hole that allowed him to access a database containing sensitive information for about 600,000 public transport users who made purchases through the Metlink web site run by the Transport Department. It was the primary site for information about train, tram and bus timetables. The database contained the full names, addresses, home and mobile phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and a nine-digit extract of credit card numbers used at the site, according to The Age newspaper in Melbourne.

Rogers says he contacted the site after Christmas to report the vulnerability but never got a response. After waiting two weeks, he contacted the newspaper to report the problem. When The Age called the Transportation Department for comment, it reported Rogers to the police.

It’s truly disappointing that a government agency has developed a website which has these sorts of flaws, Phil Kernick, of cyber security consultancy CQR, told the paper. So if this kid found it, he was probably not the first one. Someone else was probably able to find it too, which means that this information may already be out there.

The paper doesn’t say how Rogers accessed the database, but says he used a common vulnerability that exists in many web sites. It’s likely he used a SQL injection vulnerability, one of the most common ways to breach web sites and gain access to backend databases — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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