Group items tagged

In this second respect, there is and never has been a secret ballot in Britain, because the way in which individual citizens vote can be traced from each ballot paper used. Every ballot paper given to the citizen who is voting contains a serial number on it, which is also printed on the counterfoil retained by electoral officials. Before a ballot paper is handed to the citizen, he is asked for his name and address (or preferably to show the clerk his official poll card which shows his name, address and electoral registration number on it). The polling clerk then traces the person in the copy of the electoral register that he has on the table in from of him, and ticks the voter's name off the list. The clerk then tears one of the ballot papers out of the book of papers printed for the purpose, hands it to the voter and directs him or her to the private booth. And then the clerk writes the electoral registration number of the voter on the counterfoil to the ballot paper just issued.

Instead Google entered into an arrangement where by they would contact the blogger and give him or her 3 days to respond anonymously to the allegations. There was no response from the blogger so Google handed over the IP address to the court and plantiffs despite there being no legal requirement for them to do so.

What seems increasingly clear is that the combination of generous government guarantees with rampant profit-making in inadequately capitalised institutions is an accident waiting to happen – again and again and again. Either the banking industry should be treated as a utility, with regulated returns, or it should be viewed as a profit-seeking industry that operates in accordance with the laws of the market, including, if necessary, mass bankruptcies.

The modern culture of rights, and the value system that proclaims discrimination the greatest of public policy evils, finds it difficult to cope with this plain reality. It leads to an intellectual blindness that empathises with humankind in general but not in particular. He loves mankind, Voltaire wrote, therefore he does not need to love his neighbour. Many religious leaders and moral philosophers seek to extend our natural, but not unlimited, capacity for solidarity with others by calling on sacred texts and abstract principles. They are rarely very successful in this endeavour, and their efforts are usually most effective when they provide validation of their followers’ instincts.

You can hear the change in what prominent would-be centrists are saying. In the 1990s, when neoliberalism was the centre, the line was: we must slash middle-class entitlements in order to be more competitive in the global free market. Now the line is: in order to save free-market globalism from populists preying on middle-class economic anxieties, we must expand the middle-class welfare state.The winners – at least for now – are welfare state liberals such as old-fashioned New Dealers in the US and their equivalents in other countries. The position of the original “third way” of 1932-68 always made sense. Middle-class social insurance programmes, by guaranteeing economic security, reduce the appeal of populism, socialism and other kinds of ­radical statism, and make possible broad political support for open and competitive national and global markets. You will hear much more of this line as politicians rush to occupy the new centre in the years ahead.

Rupert Murdoch decides the political line of the Sun and News of the World, but not the Times and the Sunday Times, he has told a parliamentary committee.

ut the idea as well that intrigues me is that we're being "oppressed by gatekeepers"! Give me a break - it's almost autistic. One good example is the BBC's Digital Assassin Day last summer. They tried to get all the bloggers to tell them what they thought they should be doing, it was all about a new democracy and "user generated content". But in the end, four times as many BBC people were involved in staging this than members of the public who eventually showed up. That tells me people at the BBC are far more neurotic about this than they need to be. Why do they think they need to do that?

I believe (as I argue in my book The Soulful Science) that economics offers a uniquely powerful way of thinking about society, and how individuals make choices in their social context. Other approaches, those of the other social sciences, or history or literature and music, are valid too - I feel no need to dismiss them. But only economics with its choice-based models emphasises the opportunity costs and trade-offs that inevitably arise from the social and physical realities of our existence.

The victims of "post-colonial sequestration", by contrast, failed to make it past the barrier of independence and international recognition. Instead they fell into a state of half-recognised, but contested, existence. After the war of 1948-49 the "Palestine question" disappeared almost entirely from the international scene, only to re-emerge with the defeat of the Arab armies in the six-day war of 1967. Tibet too has undergone long years of neglect in the international arena, punctuated by periodic (and notably near-half-century) reincarnations of interest: the bloody British occupation of Lhasa in 1904-05, the insurrection against Chinese rule and flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, and now the uprising of March 2008 (see Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories", 18 March 2008).

it should be apparent to all of us that sometimes senior executives, including the chairman, do not fully understand the businesses in which the company is involved. The financial instruments now causing such turmoil were not properly priced for their inherent risk and managers were unaware of the integral problems with these instruments. Much of this was made possible by the advanced technology used to devise and distribute these instruments.

The questions addressed included: can a world of 9-10 billion people vote its way to a sustainable future - or are new forms of leadership (even forms of authoritarian rule) going to be necessary? Are the rising global powers (China, India and Brazil among them) best placed to move towards more sustainable forms of development?

What of the link between democracy and sustainable development? Most respondents held that voter pressure meant that democracy was of benefit to sustainable development. Yet consultation with a more specialised group of experts found that only 28% believed that capitalism (often paired with democracy in its liberal variant) aided sustainable development, against 36% who said that capitalism inhibited it. Overall, Doug Miller saw in the figures an activation of people's survival instinct: as the planet "speaks" through extreme weather events, citizens are starting to listen.

Many of the issues the roundtable addressed had been highlighted in a keynote paper commissioned ahead of the meeting from Ian Christie. This made four basic propositions about democracy, ecologically sustainable development, and environmental/sustainability campaign organisations (SD-NGOs). He argued that together, these phenomena offer a paradox about the relationship between democracy, civil society and sustainability; and that resolving it is now an urgent and complex task - for the west, for newly industrialised democracies, and for emergent democratic civil society in the global south.

"The anonymity of the Netflix Prize dataset has been broken by a pair of computer scientists from the University of Texas, according to a report from the physics arXivblog. It turns out that an individual's set of ratings and the dates on which they were made are pretty unique, particularly if the ratings involve films outside the most popular 100 movies. So it's straightforward to find a match by comparing the anonymized data against publicly available ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) (abstract on the physics arxiv). The researchers used this method to find how individuals on the IMDb privately rated films on Netflix, in the process possibly working out their political affiliation, sexual preferences and a number of other personal details"

PARIS, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Targeted online advertising is set to face increased scrutiny from European Union regulators concerned about invasion of privacy, threatening the growth of a potentially big online revenue-booster for media companies.