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The study aims to calculate the costs incurred as a consequence of crime, which includes "monetary loss in traditional terms" and "monetising the loss of life and trauma suffered by victims".Costs of crime prevention and enforcement will also be tallied. The study seeks to find out costs borne by private entities - such as security expenditure and insurance - as well as costs borne by public bodies such as proactive police patrols in anticipation of crime.The police also intend to calculate the costs incurred in response to crime - investigating cases, apprehending suspects as well as the costs expended by the State in prosecuting, convicting and incarcerating suspects.

While costs of crime prevention - such as installing alarm systems - and the State's response to crime could be measured, sociologist Paulin Straughan felt it might be "impossible" to measure the social costs of a spate of violence on a community. Social isolation and mistrust from these crimes would impact social capital on a community which would be difficult to estimate, she argued.However, the former Nominated Member of Parliament felt calculating the cost of crime would serve as "a reality check" for any society.

"We live in a world that is driven by economics," Associate Professor Straughan said. "We can't understand or appreciate unless it is documented in dollars and cents. So, this is one way of documenting it (crime) in dollars and cents to show you that every burglary cost you this (amount) … and highlight the importance of crime prevention."

As a verbal artifact, farmed content exhibits neither style nor substance.

The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information.

These prose-widgets are not hammered out by robots, surprisingly. But they are written by writers who work like robots. As recent accounts of life in these words-are-money mills make clear, some content-farm writers have deadlines as frequently as every 25 minutes. Others are expected to turn around reported pieces, containing interviews with several experts, in an hour. Some compose, edit, format and publish 10 articles in a single shift. Many with decades of experience in journalism work 70-hour weeks for salaries of $40,000 with no vacation time. The content farms have taken journalism hackwork to a whole new level.

That has sparked an uproar among some Chinese Internet users, because the unfiltered Web access will be available only to foreign companies, according to the reports. People commenting on social-networking sites have slammed the zone as a throwback to the days of "No dogs and no Chinese allowed,"a reference to how local Chinese were prohibited in the early 20th century from entering certain foreigner communities.

Chongqing Economic and Information Technology Commission, which is overseeing development of the cloud zone, declined to comment on whether the media reports about Web access were accurate. A spokeswoman said the commission continues to "push forward" with the project.

"It goes beyond ironic," he said. "The Chinese government is marketing an uncensored, unfiltered Internet connection as a selling point, while they so blatantly and purposely deny that right to the vast majority of their citizens."

freedom of information documents suggest that Soon corresponded in 2003 with other prominent climate sceptics to try to weaken a major assessment of global warming being conducted by the UN's leading climate science body, the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Soon, who had previously disclosed corporate funding he received in the 1990s, was today reportely unapologetic, telling Reuters that he agreed that he had received money from all of the groups and companies named in the report but denied that any group would have influenced his studies.

"I have never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research," he said. "I would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research."

Charles G Koch Foundation, a leading provider of funds for climate sceptic groups, gave Soon two grants totalling $175,000 (then roughly £102,000) in 2005/6 and again in 2010. In addition the American Petroleum insitute (API), which represents the US petroleum and natural gas industries, gave him multiple grants between 2001 and 2007 totalling $274,000, oil company Exxon Mobil provided $335,000 between 2005 and 2010, and Soon received other grants from coal and oil industry sources including the Mobil Foundation, the Texaco Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute.

ost disclosure statements are not designed to be read; they are designed to be clicked on. But some companies actually want their customers to read and understand the statements. They don’t want customers who might sue, and, just in case, they want to be able to prove that the customers did understand the risks. So the leaders in disclosure statements right now tend to be financial and health-care companies – and also space-travel and extreme-sports vendors. They sincerely want to let their customers know what they are getting into, because a regretful customer is a vengeful one. That means making disclosure statements readable. I would suggest turning them into a quiz. The user would not simply click a single button, but would have to select the right button for each question. For example: What are my chances of dying in space? A) 5% B) 30% C) 1-4% (the correct answer, based on experience so far; current spacecraft are believed to be safer.) Now imagine: Who can see my data? A) I can. B) XYZ Corporation. C) XYZ Corporation’s marketing partners. (Click here to see the list.) D) XYZ Corporation’s affiliates and anyone it chooses. As the customer picks answers, she gets a good idea of what is going on. In fact, if you're a marketer, why not dispense with a single right answer and let the consumer specify what she wants to have happen with her data (and corresponding privileges/access rights if necessary)? That’s much more useful than vague policy statements. Suddenly, the disclosure statement becomes a consumer application that adds value to the vendor-consumer relationship.

And show the data themselves rather than a description.

this is all very easy if you are the site with which the user communicates directly; it is more difficult if you are in the background, a third party collecting information surreptitiously. But that practice should be stopped, anyway.