Statebook is a spoof of Facebook which highlights what the Government knows about British citizens and what more information it wants to collect. [via]
Category: Uncategorized
Nassim Nicholas Taleb the author of the brilliant The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
presents in the Financial Times Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world. [via]
Also very worth reading is his essay The Fourth Quadrant: A map of the limits of statistics.
Taleb, looking at the cataclysmic situation facing financial institutions today, points out that “the banking system, betting against Black Swans, has lost over 1 Trillion dollars (so far), more than was ever made in the history of banking”.
But, as he points out, there is also good news.
“We can identify where the danger zone is located, which I call the fourth quadrant, and show it on a map with more or less clear boundaries. A map is a useful thing because you know where you are safe and where your knowledge is questionable.”
I’m not sure that those with the power to change things and those that caused the financial chaos have learnt the lesson and will likely ignore the advice of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The reason they got us into this mess and were allowed to get away with it for so long was because they were making money hand over fist using financial instruments that nobody really understood. However they were clearly operating off the map and the system became prone to be hit by a Black Swan event.
Their narrative didn’t tie with the reality of the situation at the time and in the future they will restructure the narrative of these current events to suit their own purposes. It will be the fault of the sub-prime house buyers and the poor management at the companies that collapsed and not faults inherent in the system and the lack of proper regulation.
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We’re paying rent to tax dodgers”
“We’re paying rent to tax dodgers” – Mark Thomas
Excellent post over at the Free Range Kids blog which draws a great analogy for stranger danger with a possible treatment for peanut allergies.
By administering first a dust-size speck of peanuts to an allergic child, and then a slightly larger speck and so on and so on, you can sometimes train the child’s immunological system to stop violently overreacting. It is wonderful to think that for some people, this may be a cure at last. But it’s also wonderful to think of the peanut story as an analogy to, of all things, stranger danger.
If a child is allowed to explore the world – a little at first, under loving surveillance, but more and more as the years go by — that child’s chances of overreacting to small, everyday risks diminishes. The child is gradually developing street smarts.
They go on to talk about the overreaction by a mother in a waiting room when her son approached an old lady to see what she was doing with her magnifying glass she had to help her read the paper. Swooping in to carry her child away from the old lady the mother said “He’s got to learn early NOT to talk to strangers.”
Security guru Bruce Schneier has a great essay along similar lines title The Kindness of Strangers
When I was growing up, children were commonly taught: “don’t talk to strangers.” Strangers might be bad, we were told, so it’s prudent to steer clear of them.
And yet most people are honest, kind, and generous, especially when someone asks them for help. If a small child is in trouble, the smartest thing he can do is find a nice-looking stranger and talk to him.
These two pieces of advice may seem to contradict each other, but they don’t. The difference is that in the second instance, the child is choosing which stranger to talk to. Given that the overwhelming majority of people will help, the child is likely to get help if he chooses a random stranger. But if a stranger comes up to a child and talks to him or her, it’s not a random choice. It’s more likely, although still unlikely, that the stranger is up to no good.
By exposing children to strangers in a safe way you can teach them to recognise the difference to put it simply between the behaviours of good strangers and bad strangers. Teaching them to fear everybody will only hinder them in the future and could lead them to worse danger should they ever get lost or separated from their parents.
I knew what was coming but I was still quite shocked by this advert. Very powerful stuff that should work well at raising awareness and eliciting donations to Women’s Aid.
Sorry, we didn’t agree to that. That wasn’t in the script.
I think that the dialogue is pretty clever as it is working on two levels there victims of domestic violence never signed up for that when they started the relationship, it wasn’t in their script.
A friend of mine commented on it.
The ad is disturbing, but does it actually work as a message against domestic violence? I suspect a few will see it as wish fulfilment porn, while the rest of us will just be upset by it. Does it do anything more than temporarily draw attention?
I couldn’t imagine anyone who might dislike Keira Knightley would actually get off on it once they saw it.
But yes after a little searching I was unfortunately proved wrong as shown in this bunch of comments at The Onion’s AV Club which usually is pretty good source of intelligent commentary.
Some better discussions are going on at Feministing and Metafilter.
I think that a number of people are missing the point of the purpose of the advert though. I think it has primarily been designed to temporarily draw attention, start discussion and get people to donate to Women’s Aid. It was not designed to give the message that “it is never too soon to leave an abusive relationship. There are places for you to go”. Tackling domestic violence needs a multi-pronged approach and hopefully this advert will raise awareness and funds to enable another longer term low key campaign that will give practical advice to help women in these situations get out of them.
You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a DVD. Piracy is theft.
The anti-piracy ads that were so wonderfully spoofed by the sitcom The IT Crowd will now be replaced by a softer message thanking viewers for supporting the industry in a series of ads spoofing classic films such as Jaws, Life of Brian and Lord of the Rings.
The ads, part of an anti-piracy campaign called “You Make the Movies”, mark a shift by film and TV content owners from a “stick” to a “carrot” strategy in marketing their message about copyright infringement.
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Extreme sheepherding
The Times reports that Sir James Dyson’s plans for a national engineering academy were thrown out by the government in favour of a rival scheme by a Dragons’ Den star Peter Jones saying that it would receive “more positive national publicity”.
The inventor, famous for his bagless vacuum cleaners, has separately accused John Denham, the skills secretary who announced Jones’s success, of neglecting Britain’s dire need for qualified engineers for reasons of spin.
Dyson, whose charitable foundation spent £3.5m preparing his bid for an engineering academy in Bath, was turned down last autumn for government funding in favour of Jones’s idea for an institution to teach entrepreneurship.
I agree with James Dyson’s assessment that Britain which had been at the forefront of innovation for centuries lost its way following World War II and marketing began to replace engineering as the foundation of the British economy.
It is style over substance.
That’s not to say that Peter Jones’s scheme is style over substance as entrepreneurship is a valuable skill-set to impart to young people. However we need a greater number engineers in this country and we need to value them more highly so that we have groundbreaking new inventions around which the newly minted entrepreneurs can build businesses.
I cannot wait for this movie to come out.
NY Times: Obamas to Plant White House Vegetable Garden [via]
Back in 2008 food writer Michael Pollan made a call for there to be a White House Farmer.
Other took up the call and launched the site WhiteHouseFarmer.com/ and it seems that the Obama’s have heeded the call.