Ireland's rage over Anglo-Irish rescue revelations is justified – Enda Kenny | Business | The Guardian
And nne of the best policy suggestions I've heard in a while :
The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine puts away its traditional restraint in today's edition, recommending that former Anglo executives are put in a "big sack" along with all shareholders, creditors, members of the last Irish government and relevant members of the Irish central bank and Irish and European regulatory authorities.
"Then one hits the sack with a club until the screams of pain are unbearable," it advised in an editorial.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/germans-not-pleased-as-anglo-mocking-makes-front-pages-1.1443095
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Monday, June 24, 2013
How we really rate our looks | Life and style | The Guardian
Hot or not? How we really rate our looks | Life and style | The Guardian
- We have a deep-seated need to feel good about ourselves and we naturally employ a number of self-enhancing (to use the psychological terminology) strategies to achieve this.
- Nicholas Epley study : Rather than have people simply rate their beauty compared with others, he asked them to identify an original photograph of themselves from a lineup including versions that had been morphed to appear more and less attractive. Visual recognition, reads the study, is "an automatic psychological process, occurring rapidly and intuitively with little or no apparent conscious deliberation". If the subjects quickly chose a falsely flattering image ? which most did ? they genuinely believed it was really how they looked.
- "I don't think the findings that we have are any evidence of personal delusion," says Epley. "It's a reflection simply of people generally thinking well of themselves." If you are depressed, you won't be self-enhancing.
- another study found that admiring one's own Facebook profile has palpable self-affirming effects, and that people naturally gravitate to Facebook for a boost when their ego has been knocked.
- This is why people spend more time on Facebook after a hard day or something bad happening ? because it reassures you that you're connected, that you have interesting activities and hobbies, photographs, etc." However, despite this positive emotional benefit, research has also shown that we can easily overlook the extent to which others embellish their profiles, and feel sad because our real lives aren't as good as others' appear.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Monday, June 17, 2013
Welcome to Utah, the NSA's desert home for eavesdropping on America | World news | guardian.co.uk
Welcome to Utah, the NSA's desert home for eavesdropping on America | World news | guardian.co.uk
Brewster Kahle, a co-founder of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based non-profit that hoovers up knowledge in a digital equivalent of the library of Alexandria, said technology facilitated near-ubiquitous snooping. "If one had the opportunity to collect all the voice traffic in the US it would cost less than the Pentagon spends on paperclips. Storage these days is trivial, it's not a problem."
A rack of servers the size of a fridge can store 100 TV channels' annual output, said Kahle. "What's slow to dawn on people is that this level of surveillance is technologically and economically within our grasp."
Brewster Kahle, a co-founder of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based non-profit that hoovers up knowledge in a digital equivalent of the library of Alexandria, said technology facilitated near-ubiquitous snooping. "If one had the opportunity to collect all the voice traffic in the US it would cost less than the Pentagon spends on paperclips. Storage these days is trivial, it's not a problem."
A rack of servers the size of a fridge can store 100 TV channels' annual output, said Kahle. "What's slow to dawn on people is that this level of surveillance is technologically and economically within our grasp."
The essential etiquette guide to modern life | Rafael Behr | Comment is free | The Observer
The essential etiquette guide to modern life | Rafael Behr | Comment is free | The Observer
In light of revelations about the extent of government surveillance of the internet, "Big Brother" can now be presumed once again to refer to Orwell's dystopian personality cult and not a reality TV programme. Although the latter is still broadcast on Channel 5, it is now statistically more likely that Big Brother is watching you than the other way around, which five years ago might not have been the case.
In light of revelations about the extent of government surveillance of the internet, "Big Brother" can now be presumed once again to refer to Orwell's dystopian personality cult and not a reality TV programme. Although the latter is still broadcast on Channel 5, it is now statistically more likely that Big Brother is watching you than the other way around, which five years ago might not have been the case.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Monday, June 10, 2013
stratēchery by Ben Thompson | The Cord-Cutting Fantasy
stratēchery by Ben Thompson | The Cord-Cutting Fantasy
This is a three-part series.
This is a three-part series.
- Part 1: The Cord-Cutting Fantasy. Getting only the content you want without paying for everything is a fantasy. Pay TV is socialism that works.
- Part 2: Why TV has resisted disruption. Great content is differentiated, has high barriers to entry, and depends on networks.
- Part 3: The Jobs TV Does. The key question is attention, not set top boxes. What jobs do we hire TV to do?
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Conflict in the Middle East is about more than just religion | World news | The Observer
Conflict in the Middle East is about more than just religion | World news | The Observer
The issue of how sectarianism is playing in the region's emerging conflicts – not least in Syria – is made doubly difficult by the fact that the spectre of widening Sunni-Shia conflict is also being cynically exploited, a claim made by the Iraqi scholar Harith al-Qarawee, writing in National Interest earlier this year about Iraq.
There, he argues, "sectarian identities are used by political entrepreneurs to achieve political goals. Although cultural symbolism and collective narratives are a part of this process, the real objectives are political – and largely calculated."
Friday, June 7, 2013
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Will we ever really know why people turn to terrorism? | Peter Beaumont | Comment is free | The Observer
Will we ever really know why people turn to terrorism? | Peter Beaumont | Comment is free | The Observer
Extract:
not only should we be cautious about accepting at face value the avowed rationale of those who turn to violence, but we should understand that the way terrorists frame and imagine their own acts can be as persuasive sometimes as the actual "cause" itself.
And the reality is we often start from the wrong point. The "explanatory" ideology supplied by perpetrators is not enough. It does not tell us what we really need to know: how and why an individual, even within a group, gives themselves permission to kill .
If I have a hunch, it is that what connects a certain class of killer –whether the lone gunman responsible for a mass shooting, or certain kinds of terrorist and fighters who video themselves committing atrocities – is that the way they imagine themselves in their own story impinges on reality and obscures moral considerations.
This matters because if we treat atrocities such as Woolwich in terms of a simplistic and mechanistic cause and effect, we strip events of a deeper human agency and meaning and ignore the fact that someone chose to kill, rationalised that act of murder and thought themselves exempt from our usual laws.
Perhaps most telling of all is that we never seem to ask the boring question: why do the overwhelming majority of even those attracted to an ideology, no matter how angry or alienated they might feel, not choose to commit such acts of violence?
Some medicines that don’t work. Why doesn’t the MHRA tell us honestly?
Some medicines that don’t work. Why doesn’t the MHRA tell us honestly?
Here is the bad news. It is scarcely an exaggeration to assert the following.
Nothing is known that alters the time course of a cold. There is nothing that you can buy that will suppress a cough*. There is no such thing as a "demulcent" or an "expectorant" There is no such thing as a "tonic". It would be nice if these things existed, but they are figments of the imagination. Nonetheless they sell by the truckload and vast amounts of money are made by selling them.
[*morphine may have a modest effect, but you can't buy it]
If a medical cure looks too good to be true, it probably is | Science | The Observer
If a medical cure looks too good to be true, it probably is | Science | The Observer
RELIABLE SOURCES
Testing Treatments: how to do fair tests of medical treatments.
Cabinet Office paper: how to do fair tests of social interventions
Cochrane Reviews: the best source of medical information (with plain language summaries)
NHS Choices: gives reliable assessments of stories in the news
The Lawson practice: good links to reliable medical information
Cancer Research UK: reliable information about cancer
Badscienceblogs:polices scams
Ebm-first.com: a huge resource about quackery
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