openDemocracy

The FSA stressed Britain was at the forefront of developing this market both on the high street with retail products and in the capital markets with the growth of Islamic-compliant bonds or sukuk, which are structured to pay investors profits from an underlying business rather than interest.

IT does more to hinder democracy than it does to enhance it

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.

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?

"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.

Facebook Users Complain of New Tracking By ANICK JESDANUN and RACHEL METZ – 4 days ago NEW YORK (AP) — Some users of the online hangout Facebook are complaining that its two-week-old marketing program is publicizing their purchases for friends to see.Those users say they never noticed a small box that appears on a corner of their Web browsers following transactions at Fandango, Overstock and other online retailers. The box alerts users that information is about to be shared with Facebook unless they click on "No Thanks." It disappears after about 20 seconds, after which consent is assumed.

Ultimately, consumer and business confidence are mostly irrational. The psychology of the markets is dominated by the public images that we have in mind from day to day, and that form the basis of our imaginations and of the stories we tell each other.

Bill O'Reilly can howl all he wants about the "war on Christmas." But Facebook has leaped several parsecs ahead of him, making itself into a Grinch so big that the good Dr. Seuss himself would have been gobstopped by the sheer evil magnitude of it all.

Implicit behind a lot of this stuff, like being asked to do blogging, is that we're getting a more representative view of the public.

« Previous post Next post » November 22 2007 The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos Dan Ackerman Greenberg 443 comments » Update: Dan has a follow up to this post, here. This guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Masters program in June. Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine. When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy - videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. - videos with millions and millions of views. Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ “viral” videos.

I met up with Robert Scoble last night at an Orange party in San Francisco (my photos from the party are here). He brought along his Amazon Kindle and let me and others test it out. It was the first time I’d held one - the Kindle I bought hasn’t arrived yet and my co-editor Erick covered the New York launch. Anyway, he took video of me giving my opinion of the Kindle (thumbs down). The problem is the UI is completely non-intuitive and the screen is unreadable in medium light (it was much brighter in the room than the video suggests and it was easily bright enough to read a normal book). I was trying to simply pull up the browser and go to a web page and I couldn’t figure it out. The scroll wheel on the side is obviously designed only to frustrate users. And without any sort of mouse, I kept touching the screen to try to get it to do what I wanted (which of course doesn’t work). I also compare it in the video unfavorably to the etch-a-sketch. I asked Robert to pull up a web browser and load TechCrunch. He did it once and it took so long I asked him if I could video it. He agreed, and did it again. It took him 55 seconds to pull up the browser and enter the TechCrunch URL. I then pulled out my iPhone and did the same thing in 14 seconds. The Kindle can be given some slack since web browsing isn’t its core function. But web browsing on the iPhone isn’t the key feature of that device, either. Amazon just didn’t design a good device (the user interface, keyboard and screen are all very flawed), and they had all the time in the world to get it right. Hopefully v.2 will be an improvement. Of course this is just my opinion after trying it out for a few minutes, and I’d had a couple of beers. Don MacAskill wrote up his own review after a day with the device and says its wonderful.

Thou Shalt Find It Impossible to Live Like the Bible Tells You to By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted November 17, 2007. Author A.J. Jacobs spent a year trying to follow the 600+ laws he found proscribed in the Bible, and concluded he's doomed to live in sin. Tools EMAIL PRINT 84 COMMENTS The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2007) Share and save this post: Also in Rights and Liberties Indicted! Barry Bonds Is a Perfect Distraction from Real Events Dave Zirin Striking Nurses in W. Va are Met With Intimidation, Harassment and Car Fires! Richard Negri Hillary Auditions to Be a Feminist John Wayne Susan Faludi Democracy Belongs in the Workplace, Not Just in the Voting Booth Omar Freilla Gay? U.S. House Says That's Okay Deb Price More stories by Anneli Rufus Rights and Liberties RSS Feed Main AlterNet RSS Feed Get AlterNet in your mailbox!   Advertisement border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(216, 216, 216); border-width: 0pt 1px 1px; p

#1Thou Shalt Find It Impo >