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Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.

An examination of 101 popular smartphone "apps"—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.

The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them.

, it is still amazing to see the newspaper of record publish a statement like the following about Munich Re, one of the world's largest reinsurance companies: Munich Re is already tailoring its offerings to a world of more extreme weather. It is a matter of financial survival: In 2008, heavy snows in China resulted in the collapse of 223,000 homes, according to Chinese government statistics, including $1 billion in insured lossesMunich Re's financial survival? Here Rosenthal makes a leap well beyond the perhaps understandable following along with the delusions of crowds. There are always risks to bringing data to bear on an enjoyable tale tall, but let's look anyway at what is actually going on in Munich Re's business over the past several years.

Here is what Muinch Re reported on its 2008 company performance, the year in which China suffered the heavy snows: Notwithstanding the most severe financial crisis for generations, Munich Re recorded a clear profit for the financial year 2008, in line with previous announcements. According to preliminary calculations, the consolidated profit amounted to €1.5bn.How about 2009 then? Nikolaus von Bomhard, Chairman of the Board of Management: “We have brought the financial year 2009 to a successful close: with a profit of over €2.5bn, we were even able to surpass expectations and achieve our long-term return target despite the difficult environment.” Sure, 2010 must have see some evidence of a threat to the company's financial survival?  Guess again: On the basis of preliminary estimates, Munich Re achieved a consolidated result of €2.43bn for 2010 (previous year: €2.56bn), despite substantial major losses. The profit for the fourth quarter totalled €0.48bn (0.78bn). Shareholders are to participate in last year's success through another increase in the dividend: subject to approval by the Supervisory Board and the Annual General Meeting, the dividend will rise by 50 cents to €6.25 (5.75) per share. In addition, Munich Re has announced a further share buy-back programme: shares with a volume of up to €500m are to be repurchased before the Annual General Meeting in 2012

The NYT may be unaware of the fact that not only is Munich Re in the catastrophe reinsurance business, meaning that it pays out variable and large claims for disasters, but that its business actually depends upon those disasters

The Brookings Institution has a new report out by Lawrence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz (here in PDF) on trends in global poverty

The new estimates of global poverty presented in this brief serve as a reminder of just how powerful high growth can be in freeing people from poverty. In the span of a decade, the share of the world’s population living in poverty could be cut by two-thirds, the number of countries where more than 1 in 6 people live in poverty could drop from 60 to 35, and 19 countries are poised to eliminate poverty altogether.

Of course, it is far too early to declare success in the fight against poverty. To begin with, our estimates are just that; they are not hard numbers that can be calculated in real time, and the gains we imagine might not be realized if projections of future consumption growth turn out to be overly optimistic or if the poor do not share in this growth. Moreover, even if our figures are broadly accurate, in 2015 there will still be close to 600 million people—twice the population of the United States—living on less than the meager sum of $1.25 a day. Their fates are far from secure and represent a strategic and moral failure for the rest of the world, arguably all the more so as millions of others escape poverty.

Science as a public enterprise: opening up scientific information will look at how scientific information should best be managed to improve the quality of research and build public trust.

“Science has always been about open debate. But incidents such as the UEA email leaks have prompted the Royal Society to look at how open science really is.  With the advent of the Internet, the public now expect a greater degree of transparency. The impact of science on people’s lives, and the implications of scientific assessments for society and the economy are now so great that  people won’t just believe scientists when they say “trust me, I’m an expert.” It is not just scientists who want to be able to see inside scientific datasets, to see how robust they are and ask difficult questions about their implications. Science has to adapt.”

The study will look at questions such as: What are the benefits and risks of openly sharing scientific data? How does the rise of the blogosphere change scientific research? What responsibility should scientists, their institutions and the funders of research have for open data? How do we make information more accessible and who will pay to do it? Should privately funded scientists be held to the same standards as those who are publicly funded? How do we balance openness against intellectual property rights and in the case of medical information how do protect patient confidentiality?  Will the same rules apply to scientists across the world?

A year ago, exciting news about publishing 2.0 reached the blogosphere. Thriller writer Paulo Coelho had started to tell people how he was using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more

His American publisher wasn’t too pleased though. After a rather imitating call from CEO Jane Friedman, Coelho chose a middle way and made the book viewable – but not downloadable. The torrent links are still up there though. Why? Coelho: “You’ll have to share in order to get some revenue”.

“At the end of the day, it doesn’t hurt your sales. People download the book but don’t read it They wait for the hard copy anyway”, Coelho continued. “Don’t be fooled by the publishers who say that piracy costs authors money.”

Jonathan Jones, physics professor at Oxford University and self-confessed "climate change agnostic", used freedom of information law to demand the data that is the life's work of the head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones. UEA resisted the requests to disclose the data, but this week it was compelled to do so.

Graham gave the UEA one month to deliver the data, which includes more than 4m individual thermometer readings taken from 4,000 weather stations over the past 160 years. The commissioner's office said this was his first ruling on demands for climate data made in the wake of the climategate affair.

an archive of world temperature records collected jointly with the Met Office.

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.

growing fields of plant intelligence studies and neurobotany

. Is it morally permissible to submit to total instrumentalization living beings that, though they do not have a central nervous system, are capable of basic learning and communication? Should their swift response to stress leave us coldly indifferent, while animal suffering provokes intense feelings of pity and compassion?

When it comes to a plant, it turns out to be not only a what but also a who — an agent in its milieu, with its own intrinsic value or version of the good. Inquiring into justifications for consuming vegetal beings thus reconceived, we reach one of the final frontiers of dietary ethics.

Revolutionary communities are coalescing around social networks and text messages and occupy the city with the force to topple governments. The U.S. military’s has development autonomous aerial drones that they can be launched across a place like Egypt, when the government cut off internet access to prevent people from organizing protests. These drones would fly off and hover above the city, and create ad hoc connections and networks in a new form of nomadic territorial infrastructure.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it. At as early as six months, the babies showed a preference for the helper over the hinderer. In some plays, there is a second act. The hindering figure is either punished or rewarded. In this case, 8-month-olds preferred a character who was punishing the hinderer over ones being nice to it.

history of voting math comes mainly in two chunks: the period of the French Revolution, when some members of France’s Academy of Sciences tried to deduce a rational way of conducting elections, and the nineteen-fifties onward, when economists and game theorists set out to show that this was impossible

The first mathematical account of vote-splitting was given by Jean-Charles de Borda, a French mathematician and a naval hero of the American Revolutionary War. Borda concocted examples in which one knows the order in which each voter would rank the candidates in an election, and then showed how easily the will of the majority could be frustrated in an ordinary vote. Borda’s main suggestion was to require voters to rank candidates, rather than just choose one favorite, so that a winner could be calculated by counting points awarded according to the rankings. The key idea was to find a way of taking lower preferences, as well as first preferences, into account.Unfortunately, this method may fail to elect the majority’s favorite—it could, in theory, elect someone who was nobody’s favorite. It is also easy to manipulate by strategic voting.

If the candidate who is your second preference is a strong challenger to your first preference, you may be able to help your favorite by putting the challenger last. Borda’s response was to say that his system was intended only for honest men.

It’s undeniable that people sometimes act in a way that benefits others, but it may seem that they always get something in return — at the very least, the satisfaction of having their desire to help fulfilled.

Contemporary discussions of altruism quickly turn to evolutionary explanations. Reciprocal altruism and kin selection are the two main theories. According to reciprocal altruism, evolution favors organisms that sacrifice their good for others in order to gain a favor in return. Kin selection — the famous “selfish gene” theory popularized by Richard Dawkins — says that an individual who behaves altruistically towards others who share its genes will tend to reproduce those genes. Organisms may be altruistic; genes are selfish. The feeling that loving your children more than yourself is hard-wired lends plausibility to the theory of kin selection.

The defect of reciprocal altruism is clear. If a person acts to benefit another in the expectation that the favor will be returned, the natural response is: “That’s not altruism!”  Pure altruism, we think, requires a person to sacrifice for another without consideration of personal gain. Doing good for another person because something’s in it for the do-er is the very opposite of what we have in mind. Kin selection does better by allowing that organisms may genuinely sacrifice their interests for another, but it fails to explain why they sometimes do so for those with whom they share no genes

Dan Sarewitz tossed some red meat out on the table in the form of an essay in Slate on the apparent paucity of Republicans among the US scientific establishment.  Sarewitz suggests that it is in the interests f the scientific community both to understand this situation and to seek greater diversity in its ranks, explaining that "the issue here is legitimacy, not literacy."

The issue that Sarewitz raises is one of legitimacy.  All of us evaluate knowledge claims outside our own expertise (and actually very few people are in fact experts) based not on a careful consideration of facts and evidence, but by other factors, such as who we trust and how their values jibe with our own.  Thus if expert institutions are going to sustain and function in a democratic society they must attend to their legitimacy.  Scientific institutions that come to be associated with one political party risk their legitimacy among those who are not sympathetic to that party's views.

Of course, we don't just evaluate knowledge claims simply based on individuals, but usually through institutions, like scientific journals, national academies, professional associations, universities and so on. Sarewitz's Slate article did not get into a discussion of these institutions, but I think that it is essential to fully understand his argument.

There is a widespread concern that the winner takes all mentality of the banker, and the corrupted values of the politician, have replaced a common sense ethics of fairness and integrity. Many worry that an emphasis on a shallow individualism has damaged personal relationships and weakened important social bonds.

The Citizen Ethics Network exists to promote this debate and to renew the ethical underpinnings of economic, political and daily life.