Category: Broadcasts

[OT][Rant] Gig Economy Rant

I am getting a bit irritated by the bashing that the so-called gig economy is regularly taking in the media, where Uber, Grab, and Deliveroo bashing has become the sport of the day.

The main problem in my mind is not that the companies in question provide very little in terms of welfare for their workers compared to conventional companies, but that the gig economy is increasingly abused by people who work their gigs as full-time jobs ― the gig economy was never designed to do that!

The gig economy was created to allow people who need some extra cash to work and earn money quickly and without much hassle in terms of paperwork, or being tied down in contracts that do not suit their lifestyle.  Students come to mind, who want to earn some extra spending money in their time off, or people who do hold a full-time job but want to earn a few extra pounds in their spare time to finance a particular project or holiday.

Unfortunately, this initial purpose has been more or less overtaken by people who now use the gig economy as their sole and full-time income.  I guess their main motivation is the assumption that a period working in the gig economy in their CV still looks better than a period being unemployed.  These people probably were not even planning to work longterm in the gig economy, but have been struggling to find a full-time job, and so are stuck in a rot.

The resulting situation is now that the increasing number of people who abuse the gig economy as full-time employment now demand that it treats them as full-time employees.   Again, I sympathise with the sentiment, but they are asking for something the gig economy was never designed to provide.

The problem with all of this is that if we now redesign the gig economy to become full-time employment, by legislating to force the gig companies to provide the same level of welfare to their workers as normal employers, we effectively make the gig economy disappear;  which then in turn causes problems to those people who depend on the gig economy, as their current life circumstances do not allow them to hold a full-time job.  Most notably, we are depriving students of one of their main ways to finance their studies…

In my mind, what has to happen is the realisation that the gig economy is not there to provide full-time employment through the back door.  If you want a job that feeds your family and lasts a lifetime, then the gig economy is not for you;  and if you really think that you are so good at your gig that it should feed your family, then maybe you should take the plunge, go freelance, and start a business.

Maybe the real question we need to ask is why are there so many people who try to make a living through the gig economy, but the uneasy answer we will probably find down that route is that our record-low unemployment right now is not actually as low as the numbers suggest, or the politicians would like us to believe…

[OT] Sleep Tracker Reviews

Since I am travelling a lot ― for work as well as pleasure ― I also tend to suffer from jet lag a lot. Trying to get on top of that problem, I was first of all trying to find a way to reliably monitor and measure it ― once an engineer, always an engineer…

So I downloaded and installed a number of sleep tracker apps to see how good they were, and found the result to be shocking. The algorithm of the two I have tried so far was deeply flawed in a very similar manner. Below are the results of my ‘research’….

Pillow

This app would be absolutely brilliant, if not for the fact that its algorithm is deeply flawed. Instead of comparing your actual sleep against your goal, the sleep score is calculated by comparing the time you have been asleep against the time you have been in bed.

So, if I come home after a late night’s work and go to bed at 2300 hrs, then have to get up at 0500 hrs in the morning to go back to work, I get a very high sleep score, because I was asleep virtually the entire time I was in bed. Was this a good sleep, though…? Definitely not, at least two hours too short.

On the other hand, if I have a long lie-in on a Sunday, so was in bed from — say — 2200 hrs waking up around 0700 hrs and then snoozing until 1000 hrs, I get a very poor sleep score, because the time I was in bed vastly exceeds the time I was actually asleep.

Funny enough, the second type of sleep which gets the very low score is by far the one I’d prefer to always have!

If you don’t believe me, carry out the following experiment: Stop your alarm clock when you wake up, and take a note of your sleep score. Then switch the alarm back on: Pillow will offer you to continue your sleep or start a new session — choose ‘continue’. When you next wake up, or if you just lie in bed for another half an hour, you will notice that your sleep score has drastically reduced. Why? You already had a good night’s sleep according to your first score, so anything after that is a bonus, right…?

Since the sleep score is unreliable, therefore all the other little gadgets — most notably your ability to create unlimited numbers of notes, which allow you to then analyse a very complex set of circumstances — are useless. If the sleep score has no relation to how good my sleep was, then the notes will recommend the wrong thing, because they are trying to raise my sleep score. So, at the moment, going by my sleep notes, I should be working late, eat late and too much, never ever have any exercise, and drink lots of alcohol, because those are the nights that get the highest score.

Also, with all its cleverness, it never seems to have occurred to the programmers to take into account the one variable the app has always access to, and which probably has the largest impact on sleep quality, namely the time I went to bed. Believe it or not, your bedtime is completely ignored in the sleep quality analysis.

Sleep Better

The next tracker I tried was Adidas-sponsored “Sleep Better”, mainly due to being recommended by the Apple Health app.  Unfortunately, I quite quickly figured out that it suffered from exactly the same problem as “Pillow“, see above, with exactly the same flaw in the sleep score algorithm.

Additionally, it has much less features.  For example, unlike the unlimited and fully customisable notes provided by Pillow, there are only six preset notes, namely

  1. Worked out
  2. Stressful Day
  3. Not my Bed
  4. Ate late
  5. Caffeine, and
  6. Alcohol

“Not my bed” seems like a good idea, and applies to me quite often ― travelling a lot on business ― but then again is useless because I almost never will  have a socket close enough to the hotel bed to actually run a sleep-tracker overnight.  So, this is a note that I personally don’t need, and if I am limited to six notes only, where I would really rather track something else ― well, tough luck, take it or leave it, it’s not customisable…

Having said that, Sleep Better has two feature I like very much:  Dream Notes, which track the quality and quantity of dreams, and Insights, which tracks sleep quality against moon phases, which I consider an interesting experiment.

 

Conclusions

I grudgingly have returned to using Pillow for the time being, as Sleep Better‘s very limited note capability just was not up to the level of analysis I would like to perform to see what influences my jet lag.  I have left feedback on Pillow‘s app page, which received only a very non-committal reply from the developers

“Pillow’s sleep quality score takes into account a lot of different criteria including the time to sleep, time asleep, time spent on each sleep stage, any existing audio data and many more.“

No kidding!  Well, hopefully the reply was deliberately vague in order to not to have to admit that the algorithm is faulty.  With a bit of luck, they will now take a good look at their algorithm, and reconsider what they are actually trying to track.

I will update this post as and when new information becomes avaiable…  

 

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Tinker Bell’s Adventures

Following an impulse buy that nearly led to the first argument between my then-girlfriend ― now fiancee ― and a day of holiday sacrificed running around Quezon City on the Philippines, I am now the proud owner of a DJI Spark drone.  Due to its small size compared to other drones, we decided to call her Tinker Bell.

This blog has been created to follow the unfolding adventures of our curious little fairy, and maybe make contact with other drone pilots… my main interest is in historic monuments and landscapes, so if you are after death-defying stunts captured by drones flown at the very limit of their capabilities, then this site is probably not for you….