Slashdot Mirror

first of all, he's an evolutionary theorist at the London School of Economics. I simply can't believe the BBC is printing such garbage. I mean, I like sci-fi as much as the next guy, but this is pure fantasy.

His credentials are first class. A first degree in Natural History and a PhD on the interaction between evolution and morality.

The LSE is one of the best universities in the world and is the home of the Darwin collection.

first of all, he's an evolutionary theorist at the London School of Economics. I simply can't believe the BBC is printing such garbage. I mean, I like sci-fi as much as the next guy, but this is pure fantasy.

His credentials are first class. A first degree in Natural History and a PhD on the interaction between evolution and morality.

The LSE is one of the best universities in the world and is the home of the Darwin collection.

first of all, he's an evolutionary theorist at the London School of Economics. I simply can't believe the BBC is printing such garbage. I mean, I like sci-fi as much as the next guy, but this is pure fantasy.

His credentials are first class. A first degree in Natural History and a PhD on the interaction between evolution and morality.

The LSE is one of the best universities in the world and is the home of the Darwin collection.

Two, there is evolutionary pressure, caused by partner selection. This is the basis of TFA! Good looking people tend to find good looking partners and make good looking children, ditto for the not-good-looking. I would add to this the element of wealth, I think it's quite important: I grew up in a very rich suburb where my schoolmates were uncommonly pretty. I realized that the people rich enough to live in that neighborhood attracted uncommonly pretty partners. No mystery why, and no surprise that the children turned out pretty. Now when you consider how little class-mixing there is in the US, and how little social mobility there is (that's right, look it up!) This means that money, and the extra attractiveness it brings, stays in families. Families with money will typically marry pretty people - most likely from other rich/pretty families, but possibly someone from a lower class who happened to look good. This means the upper classes poach the best lookers from below, making themselves even prettier. Because in each generation, the best looking people marry out of their lower class, this leaves the people of lower class with a increasingly uglier partner pool (on average, of course).

As this trend advances, the increasingly pretty rich will find fewer eligible partners among the increasingly ugly lower classes. Now that you have two non-interbreeding groups, each with different selection pressures, it's not hard to imagine a further divergence. It's not a pleasant thing to picture, but it's not really so crazy!

A brief Bio of the guy:here
and the course work offered at the London School of Economics: here
He is apparently a researcher for the Evolutionary Moral Psychology Group at LSE. The group doesn't seem too keen on actual biology or evolutionary research, just extrapolating biological theory into philosophical concepts so his prediction should be taken with a rather large grain of salt.

A brief Bio of the guy:here
and the course work offered at the London School of Economics: here
He is apparently a researcher for the Evolutionary Moral Psychology Group at LSE. The group doesn't seem too keen on actual biology or evolutionary research, just extrapolating biological theory into philosophical concepts so his prediction should be taken with a rather large grain of salt.

I will remain skeptical of this, and I encourage eveyone else to as well. Not only is this NOT published in a peer reviewd journal, none of his research is! In fact his publication history over at the Londong School of Economics are filled with mostly book reviews!

Less social and economic mobility; ...

Au contraire...
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformati onOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTru st_report.htm

In a comparison of eight European and North American countries, Britain and the United States have the lowest social mobility
...
A careful comparison reveals that the USA and Britain are at the bottom with the lowest social mobility. Norway has the greatest social mobility, followed by Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Germany is around the middle of the two extremes, and Canada was found to be much more mobile than the UK.

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/about/news/IntergenerationalM obility.pdf

Less social and economic mobility; ...

Au contraire...
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformati onOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTru st_report.htm

In a comparison of eight European and North American countries, Britain and the United States have the lowest social mobility
...
A careful comparison reveals that the USA and Britain are at the bottom with the lowest social mobility. Norway has the greatest social mobility, followed by Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Germany is around the middle of the two extremes, and Canada was found to be much more mobile than the UK.

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/about/news/IntergenerationalM obility.pdf

Just in case you live in London or happen to travel through it - there is a whole network of RFID readers installed that everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) has free access to.

If you don't really want to make it visible that you've nuked your RFID by using the microwave method you'd obviously do it at a level of power that wouldn't turn the thing into a visible crisp (i.e. you have plausible deniability of your involvement in the chip malfunction) - but how would you know you've been succesful?

Simple:

(1) take the functioning passport into a Tube station (London Underground for those new there ;-).

(2) hold the passport against the Oyster card reader. The machine will complain about an unregistered card, or in any case acknowledge that something RFID-enabled was near the reader (this, by the way, is also why you should keep the Oyster travel card separate - the system is unable to separate simultaneous responses so two cards present at the same time will confuse it). Keep this in mind the next time you want to check for RFIDs and don't have a tester handy :-)

(3) Go forth and nuketh the darn thing. Or use a hammer, but I think doing that in the Tube station could get you arrested for carrying an offensive weapon (no, there's a different law for mouths :-).

(4) repeat (2) to see if you've zapped it properly. If the reader doesn't acknowledge your passport the evil deed has been done!

There is a certain degree of irony in having a public/private funded system helping in negating the effects of a public/private funded waste of money (the background of the ID Card project would be farcical if it hadn't resulted in such a vaste waste of taxpayer's money).

They could, of course, change the software, but that would prove that the RFID numbers aren't quite as random as advertised...

As an alumn, it makes me proud to see such straight talk from the LSE on the social costs and accountability concerns of biometric tech.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformati onOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2006/IDCard_Status ReportJan06.htm

"Dozens of questions about the scheme's architecture, goals, feasibility, stakeholder engagement and outcomes remain unanswered. These questions are outlined in this report. The security of the scheme remains unstable, as are the technical arrangements for the proposal. The performance of biometric technology is increasingly questionable. We continue to contest the legality of the scheme. The financial arrangements for the proposals are almost entirely secret, raising important questions of constitutional significance."

As a German living in the UK for far too long, I'll happily sue each of these companies.

>"As of 1 July 2008, we will only serve alcohol to people who can produce ID, regardless of their apparent age. The only acceptable form of ID is a UK ID card or passport".
Here's my EU passport. Will you serve me my lukewarm cervisia, or should I sue you for racial discrimination?

>"As of 1 July 2008, this company will be taking positive steps to ensure illegal immirants aren't employed. To that end, anyone applying for a job must show a UK ID card before they will be offered a role".
Any reputable company already takes a copy of your entitlement to work in the UK - i.e. passport or EU ID card. Or foreign passport and work visa.

> "In order to combat Identity Theft, as of 1 July 2008, you will be required to show your ID card when paying by debit/credit card".
Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
In big shops in the UK, you can pay for £0.20 worth of chewing gum on your credit card if you want; they're not going to want to ask for your ID. Why would they? Together with the banks they've just swapped the "If we can't prove you made the payement, you're not liable" system for the "If someone can observe or guess your 4 digit pin, you're fucked" chip and pin system. More ID would only hurt the retailers and the banks.

"In line with Money Laundering Regulations, we will only open a bank account for people who can demonstrate their identity. As of 1 July 2008, we will only accept an ID card issued by an EU member state."
That's already pretty much the case. Of course you could get a birth certificate instead, which is obviously fairly useless. But you'll need that to get the ID card in the first place, so it's basically a coverup.

What really needs to be addressed with the UK Scheme is that:
1. It's ridiculously expensive. Whether you pay upfront or through taxes is really irrelevant.
2. It is completely ineffective against all the things it is supposed to solve:
2.1 Benefit fraud: The government admits that 95% of it is "misrepresentation of circumstances", not ID fraud. You can throw biometrics at me 'til the cows come home; if I say my back hurts you still can't prove me wrong. Until you catch me playing sqash, but ID cards don't help much on that.
2.2 Terrorism. All the tube bombers would have been able to get their squeaky clean ID cards. As would Richard Reid. Ok, so identifying bodies might be a tad quicker, so clearly that would be 19.2 billion well ( spent, Not like we need that money anywhere else.
2.3 Immigration. If you're an illegal immgrant without any documets, will you fret about not having another document? No? Exactly. Earth to Labour, Earth to Labour - bugger, they're not receiving common sense anymore.
2.4 Health Care. Health care. At the moment, if you show up at a hospital with a non-life-threating problem, it will take hours before you're seen. Fair enough, in a nasty sort of way. On the other hand, if you're actually about to die, you will get treated, with the full whack that modern medicine can deliver. And it's not cheap. I know an old gentleman of foreign extraction who managed to rack up about £40K before leaving the High Dependency Unit. Are they going to let old men die on the street for lack of ID?

Anyway, the UK government has no respect for human rights. In some former governments, that would have been expected; in a nominally labour government, it's shocking. Intercepting people's private communications without warrant; locking people up indefinitely without trial; making the political system even less accountable. Shame I can't blame them for the first past the post system, but they only benefit from it rather than introducing it. On the other hand, they repl

This paper is older than I recall the news hype hitting (spring of 2005 or fall of 2004).

The US has less social mobility than Europe.

That's just utter and complete BS, sir.

A careful comparison reveals that the USA and Britain are at the bottom with the lowest social mobility. Norway has the greatest social mobility, followed by Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Germany is around the middle of the two extremes, and Canada was found to be much more mobile than the UK.

Over longer time periods, there is more mixing but still not that much and those who do slip into different quintiles are typically at the borders of their category (e.g. those dropping out of the top quintile are typically at the bottom of that group). Only around 5% of families rise from bottom to top, or fall from top to bottom.

British Keynesian economist Will Hutton quotes US data from 2000-1 which "compare[s] the mobility of workers in America with the four biggest European economies and three Nordic economies." The US "has the lowest share of workers moving from the bottom fifth of workers into the second fifth, the lowest share moving into the top 60 per cent and the highest share unable to sustain full-time employment." He cites an OECD study which "confirms the poor rates of relative upward mobility for very low-paid American workers; it also found that full-time workers in Britain, Italy and Germany enjoy much more rapid growth in their earnings than those in the US . . . However, downward mobility was more marked in the US; American workers are more likely to suffer a reduction in their real earnings than workers in Europe." Thus even the OECD (the "high priest of deregulation") was "forced to conclude that countries with more deregulated labour and product markets (pre-eminently the US) do not appear to have higher relative mobility, nor do low-paid workers in these economies experience more upward mobility. The OECD is pulling its punches. The US experience is worse than Europe's."

Systemizing occupations

• Executative, managerial, adminstrative such as financial managers, analysts, etc.
• Professional: architects, engineers, etc.
• Technicians

Empathizing occupations

• Professional: nurses, speech therapists, teachers, counselors

...is native PDF support. For example you can create diagrams in Omnigraffle or Adobe Illustrator (say) or equations in LaTeX (dragged and dropped from here) and insert them easily into your document as vector graphics. This means that they can still be scaled, rotated or otherwise transformed without any loss of quality even though they are no longer in the package that created them. This is a great boon for people preparing technical presentations.

Why indeed?

English speaking? Proximity to water? Same timezone as the burgeoning Asian markets, yet Anglo-friendly for multinationals wanting to build their presence in Asia.

If you consult some studies from people who have actually the phenomenon of the 'Global City', you'll find that Sydney meets the criteria, whereas, for example Singapore (trotted out as the 'real' Global City in the region) is better described as a 'city state'.

Sydney has established itself as the leading Australian city in world city terms (Baum,1997; Stimson, 1995). It is the major international air hub, is the most important financial centre and, during the growth in Asian economies, extended its role tobecome a location for many transnational corporations wanting to service south eastAsia.

With your final comment - you come off sounding like you have "Tall Poppy Syndrome". Your city not on the list hey?

These are all the free (as in beer) applications I use all the time:

WireTap: Save an audio file of any sound being played on the Mac by any other application.

DVDBackup: Great for backing up DVDs (while removing region coding, CSS encryption, and Macrovision encryption.) You'll still need Toast to burn the DVDs though.

PixelNhance: A must-have to tinker with the color/brightness/contrast etc. of your digital pictures.

Pixen: The best pixel-level editor on any platform.

MorphX: Morphs one image into another.

SnapNDrag: For screen captures (Grab is another basic screen capture utility that comes bundled with OSX).

Galerie: Puts your photos in a nice album-type gallery of web pages for being served by a web server.

LaTex Equation Editor and Tex Fog: The equation editors I use. Requires Tex/LaTex to be installed..

And if you are into LaTex, you'll also want CPlot: A parametric equation plotter.

CyberDuck: Open source S/FTP client. (Other FTP clients for OSX include osXigen, Transmit, Fetch, Fugu...).

Onyx: A must-have system utility.

MenuMeter: Another must-have system info utility. Excellent.

Books: A library software (book database).

Xnippets: A decent information organiser.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Backup software. (Donationware)

A few apps I have gladly paid money to use:

ChartSmith: Wonderfull for making all kinds of charts you have ever thought of (and some you haven't).

EvoCAM: Great app to record/play (or otherwise control) a Firewire/USB camera hooked to your Mac. Well worth the shareware price. (Also checkout their other offerings - ImageDV and VideoScope)

Intaglio: The 2D vector drawing/CAD program of my choice for simple CAD/ technical drawings.

Keynote: A (much better than) PowerPoint replacement from Apple. I use this all the time. (When it came out originally, I paid $$ for it; I heard Apple is bundling it with iLife now?)

Little Snitch: Keeps tabs on any stealth connections being made to/from your Mac, Shareware.

Intuem: Nice MIDI app with a clean interface. (GarageBand, one of Apple's iLife apps, is great for Audio/MIDI as well, but I find it limiting for my purpose because it does not do MIDI-out to my keyboard/synth.)

cheers- raga

if you look at his UK pictures, they're all in london and if you put them on a map most of them are within 2 or 3 square miles of each other. I havent been to london much but i spotted a few he missed too like the one practically on the LSE campus and another round the back streets of the southbank near the tate modern.
i hope his job pays well!!

Flamebait or no, time and time again socialism and liberalism is proven to be the most inefficient form of government.

However, I find that if you have any real sort of equations, it's going to get kinda scary when you move it from one computer to another.

This is why Apple's Keynote software rocks. You can import PDF graphics (and it keeps them as vector graphics, rather than PP), which means you can use LaTeX to prepare the equations, export them as PDF, and drop them directly on the slide. For example, see the LaTeX Equation Editor

Mr. Wade's point is not very interesting

Basic courtesy, please, it's Professor Wade. And bear in mind that in a UK University, 'professor' does not mean 'tenured lecturer'.

You can also point slashdotters to wade's publications where one can find such classics as 'US hegemony and the World Bank: the fight over people & ideas' http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/destin/wader.html westerns who have no critical thinking skills and feel guilty about their wealth compared to non western nations will enjoy these the most.

well you could look here for starters http://econ.lse.ac.uk/

I can't let this go by without a challenge.

You are wrong from an intellectual, philosophical, and historical viewpoint.

Might I suggest that in the future if you wish to expand on a subject, that you do your own reading and research, rather than rely on the definitions the latest demagogues and politicians wish to pour into you?

If you say you don't want a mansion, you're a liar. It's called the American Dream.

Not everyone's dreams are limited to the "bling-bling" sets of a "YO! MTV Raps" video dude.

FWIW, you can find more of Levin's work at various places. Prof. Danny Quah also has some thoughts on the subject.

It would take an obscene amount of money to feed everyone that is starving in the world, provide the infrastructure necessary to send the food everywhere it needs to go, and insure that they will be able to provide for themselves in the future

Actually, that all exists already. There is already way too much food in the world - the US and EU destroy millions of tonnes of it every year. After all, food surpluses are a precondition of population growth, not the other way round, and the population is growing.

Growing the food is easy - our civilization understood farming centuries ago. Distributing the food is easy - logistics is a well-developed science, practiced by Walmat, UPS and the Marines, you can even do a degree in it. The difficult part is purely in the realm of the political. So long as tyrants like Robert Mugabe use starvation as a tool of population control, or nations like Somalia keep feudal civil wars going, famines are inevitable.

These are the men with just enough "obscene amount of money", but have failed to act.

The Gates Foundation has given billions away. Literally. What have you done?

3,000,000 counts of manslaughter per year.

If you really believed that, you wouldn't have a computer to post to /. from, or indeed any other posessions. You would have given every cent to charity and right now be working for free on a subsistence farm in the third world. But you'd rather sit on the sidelines and run your mouth about things that are far beyond your understanding.

Yeah, and what about the LEO?
The Lyons Electronic Office was the world's first business computer, and it was British through and through.
See here and here to learn more about the first ever business application of computing. The foresight shown by Lyons executives in the late 1940s put them way ahead of everyone in the world, and this from a company best known at the time for their teashops.

Very true.

I rather like Ian Angell's take on it - in "The New Barbarian Manifesto", he says that yes, today's technological elite will remain mobile and today's middle class will vanish into the underclass.

The difference between Angell and Beck is that Angell (correctly, IMO) scoffs at the idea that the technological elite will be a "more communicative and civically-involved" citizen. Acting in their own (enlightened or otherwise) self-interest, such citizens may be more "global" and "better-informed", but they'll likely just relocate to wherever taxes are lowest and the underclass is kept at a safe distance.

The "hard problem" (if you're a government) will be retaining your knowledge workers (on whom your economy depends) while retaining the voting support of your service workers. Problem is, if your service workers vote themselves benefits to the point that it becomes more profitable for your global knowledge workers to leave, the knowledge workers will take off for more friendly markets, leaving your service workers with nothing to do, because nothing's being produced in your country anymore. Either way, the welfare state is toast.

Classic Angell essays: http://csrc.lse.ac.uk/angell.htm

Recommended Reading: PDFs of "The signs are clear: the future is inequality" and "Winners and Losers in the Information Age".

Representative quotation: "Democracy will degenerate to being the means of governing the immobile and dependent service workers."

I point out here that Angell doesn't see this as a "good thing" (as his admirers often do) or a "bad thing" (as do his detractors). His point, as an economist, is merely that such a change is inevitable, and that governments and individuals had better get ready for it.

About LEO

LEO Computers Society

Hope that helps. A search on "lyons bakery" should throw up more information in any decent search engine.

I happen to think Sovereign Individual was pretty cool. But I'm one of them eeeevul cyberselfish libertarian types.

But Katz? I was expecting a massive flame of Biblical proportions - and yet Katz is "interested". Katz is probably the exact opposite, ideologically, of Rees-Mogg and what-not. I'm stunned that Katz didn't use the word "corporatism" or "globalism" once! These guys make the most slavering Randroid look like a shiny-happy hippychick.

Hey kids, if you liked Sovereign Individual, you'll love Ian Angell, who argues (quite convincingly) that The signs are clear: the future is inequality.

Lucky for us geeks, we actually have a chance to win in the upcoming global social catastrophe. Pity about the other poor bastards, though.

I happen to think Sovereign Individual was pretty cool. But I'm one of them eeeevul cyberselfish libertarian types.

But Katz? I was expecting a massive flame of Biblical proportions - and yet Katz is "interested". Katz is probably the exact opposite, ideologically, of Rees-Mogg and what-not. I'm stunned that Katz didn't use the word "corporatism" or "globalism" once! These guys make the most slavering Randroid look like a shiny-happy hippychick.

Hey kids, if you liked Sovereign Individual, you'll love Ian Angell, who argues (quite convincingly) that The signs are clear: the future is inequality.

Lucky for us geeks, we actually have a chance to win in the upcoming global social catastrophe. Pity about the other poor bastards, though.