Well, GFPs, there I was, furiously typing away at your latest dispatch from the frontiers of the data gap when who should call but the estate agent, to inform me that our vendors have decided to pull out just before exchange (as in after I've shelled out £££ in fees). There go my dreams of being out of my tiny London flat and into a house with the A[merican]B[eefcake] by Christmas. Gutted isn't the word. F*cked [hello BMA] off is closer to the mark given the amount of money I've burned. I feel like a total mug, but I guess that's the English property market -- all the risk is on the buyer and the vendor can just change their mind with no financial penalties whatsoever. Oh well, on with the show I guess because the data gap waits for no $!**!&@&£@R*@£(&! you get the picture.Here is the original introduction you would have got....but since I hadn't finished the original newsletter, you may notice a slight change in tone halfway through. And this is also why the newsletter is late. 🤷♀️
Roll up, roll up, GFPs, it's NEWSLETTER TIME!
THIS WEEK, we discover an unlikely ally in the shape of Winston Churchill! After the House of Commons was bombed out in 1941, there was a discussion over how to rebuild the space: should they adopt a circle or horseshoe design, or stick with the original rectangular space??
SPOILER:
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Anyway, Churchill was with the rectangles, arguing that this design was key to the British two-party system, which must be preserved: "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us," he said. No argument there, Winston. GFPs may, of course, have differing opinions over whether our adversarial two-party system is, in fact, the pinnacle of modern democracy Churchill seemed to think it.
Gender Data Gap of the week
OK let's just run through some facts here shall we?
Women make up 98% of the early years workforce
Women are almost twice as likely to have lost their jobs or had their hours reduced than men
Women are also shouldering the brunt of the transfer of childcare from schools and nurseries to parents
So does it seem likely that these job-losses are the gender neutral (or even, given the stick figures, the default male) represented by the image?
I also can't help but notice the losses are concentrated at the lower end of the pay scale and I can't help wondering where exactly in the pay scale it is likely that the 2% of men lies...I couldn't find data on that though, naturally.
In conclusion: Sex. Disaggregate. Your. Data. I feel like I may have mentioned this before.
Default Male of the week
Loyal readers will remember that in Invisible Women I had a little section on car design. You see, because we have still never yet designed an average female car crash test dummy, and because we still conduct the majority of car crash safety tests using a car crash test dummy based around the anthropometric measurements of the average American male in the 1980s, women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die if they get into a car crash than a man.
So naturally I was delighted to see we have already moved on to testing how comfy men might be sleeping in autonomous vehicles.
Automated driving: A biomechanical approach for sleeping positions - ScienceDirect Occupants of autonomous vehicle have frequently indicated the desire to sleep or rest while driving, yet little has been known regarding the suitable …
Yes, that's right, we have tested the optimum sleeping comfort position for 23 male subjects with "a buttock-to-knee length of 64.5–61.5 cm[...]representing the 30th to 65th percentiles of male Germans". It was "for the sake of homogeneity" so that's ok I guess, given the human race is famously super homogenous.
The paper does actually right at the end acknowledge that this may be a teensy problem, given
females sit with more anterior rotation of the pelvis as well as less flexion of the lumbar spine and thus, yield different contact pressure patterns (Dunk and Callaghan, 2005) [and] it has also been implied that women are more sensitive for contact pressures and have a lower threshold for the onset of discomfort (Binderup et al., 2010; Vink and Lips, 2017).
"Nevertheless," they actually, genuinely say, with a straight face (presumably since I can't actually see their faces), "the current study is the first of attempts in evaluating the biomechanical quality of in-vehicle sleeping positions based on interface pressure distributions."
Well you can't argue with that. I guess safety for women can wait.
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GFP Corner
A GFP who has just got divorced received this from Bradford Crown Court
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Event of the Week!
I'm doing an event! With the IMF! Come join! I may be in less of a f**king terrible mood by then!!!!
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Poppy VID of the week
Please accept this gracious gift from the AB who definitely has not spent too much time making poppy videos
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That's it! Apologies for the massive grump, you will forgive me. xoxoxo