The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of 21 books on the crisis, 11 written by academics, and 10 written by journalists and one former Treasury Secretary. No single narrative emerges from this broad and often contradictory collection of interpretations, but the sheer variety of conclusions is informative, and underscores the desperate need for the economics profession to establish a single set of facts from which more accurate inferences and narratives can be constructed.
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How to Hide from Google
“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” —blue_beetle, Metafilter discussion.
Google started off the new year by announcing that they will be changing their privacy policies so that they can create more detailed profiles of their users. Starting March 1st, 2012, Google will combine information from user’s Gmail, Google Search history, YouTube, and other services. Prior to this change, Google profiled their users, but restricted the profile data use to the service from which the data was collected.
Why Facebook Is Never Safe
How to use Facebook safely
Here’s the easy solution: don’t fucking surveil yourself! If you want to stay safe on Facebook, the answer is, you should not use it, and don’t tag people! There are benefits of using it, there are tradeoffs, but in the long run I think it’s going to be pretty bad that you gave a bunch of capitalists all your private information where the US government asserts and has the right to read it without a warrant and with the ability to gag the corporate.
What’s the greatest database of Jews on the planet? Facebook. What will happen when you want the biggest database of leftists on the planet? Or right wing people? That’s really, really scary, so one way to not be part of that dataset is to not put yourself in it voluntarily, and to chastise people who only hang out with you to tag you in facebook as a sort of conspicuous consumption of the 21st Century say: “Hey, if that’s all you get out of our friendship then go fuck yourself!”
There’s an important distinction, this idea of privacy by policy and privacy by design. Privacy by policy is the idea that there is a policy that is like the law. But policy doesn’t really matter because someone can say they’re not going to log, but then they do log. They say they’re not going to give the log data out but someone will copy it, or maybe they’ll sell it.
Disruptions: So Many Apologies, So Much Data Mining
Last week, Arun Thampi, a programmer in Singapore, discovered that the mobile social network Path was surreptitiously copying address book information from users’ iPhones without notifying them.
David Morin, Path’s voluble chief executive, quickly commented on Mr. Thampi’s blog that Path’s actions were an “industry best practice.” He then became uncharacteristically quiet as the Internet disagreed and erupted in outrage. Amid his silence, he did take the time to reply to the actress Alyssa Milano, who was one of hundreds who questioned Path’s practices. (His reply to her via Twitter contained his personal e-mail address.)
Mr. Morin seemed unconcerned about how people could be harmed by his company’s carelessness. Consider this: Amira El Ahl, a foreign journalist covering the Middle East, said bloggers in Egypt and Tunisia are often approached online who are state security in disguise.
The Classes Drift Apart: Can the rich save the American dream by preaching what they practise?
JUST because he belongs to it himself does not make Newt Gingrich wrong when he grumbles that America is run by an out-of-touch elite. If you want evidence, the data can now be found in a book published this week by Charles Murray, the co-author in 1994 of “The Bell Curve”, which became controversial for positing a link between race and intelligence. That controversy should not deter you. “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010” brims with ideas about what ails America.
David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, thinks it will be the most important book this year on American society. And even if you do not buy all Mr Murray’s ideas about what ails America, you will learn much about what conservatives think ails America, a subject no less fascinating. Though it does not set out to do so, this book brings together four themes heard endlessly on the Republican campaign trail. They are the cultural divide between elite values and mainstream values (a favourite of the tea-partiers); the case for religion and family values (think Rick Santorum); American exceptionalism (all the candidates); and (a favourite of Mitt Romney’s) the danger of America becoming a European welfare state.
Art & Car Design
To appreciate the resonance of the last decade’s revolution in BMW design, it’s necessary to understand the company’s huge historic debt to a modernist ideas factory that became the world’s most influential art school.
‘Art and technology : a new unity’ was the Bauhaus slogan and before the Second World War, BMW already had a department of Kunstlerische Gestaltung (Artistic Development), the first of its kind. The Nazis closed the radical Bauhaus in 1933, but in the fifties its spirit was revived in Ulm’s Hochschule fur Gestaltung. Everything we understand by German Design was confirmed by Ulm: clarity, discipline, logic, fuss-free surfaces and the (sometimes forbidding) semantics of technical authority.
The modern BMW look is established – with Hofmeister knick
Most print newspapers will be gone in five years, The desktop PC is dead; long live the tablet.
Over the next three years, according to Cole, the tablet will become the primary tool for personal computing. Use of a desktop PC will dwindle to only 4-6 percent of computer users – writers, gamers, programmers, analysts, scientists, and financial planners – and laptop use will decline as well.
“The tablet is such an inviting gadget,” said Cole. “The desktop PC is a ‘lean forward’ device – a tool that sits on a desk and forces uses to come to it. The tablet has a ‘lean-back’ allure — more convenient and accessible than laptops and much more engaging to use. For the vast majority of Americans, the tablet will be the computer tool of choice by the middle of the decade, while the desktop PC fades away.
“We don’t see a negative consequence in the move to tablets,” said Cole, “but the coming dominance of tablets will create major shifts in how, when, and why Americans go online – changes even more significant than the emergence of the laptop.”……..
“Circulation of print newspapers continues to plummet, and we believe that the only print newspapers that will survive will be at the extremes of the medium – the largest and the smallest,” said Cole. It’s likely that only four major daily newspapers will continue in print form: The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. At the other extreme, local weekly newspapers may still survive.
“The impending death of the American print newspaper continues to raise many questions,” Cole said. “Will media organizations survive and thrive when they move exclusively to online availability? How will the changing delivery of content affect the quality and depth of journalism?”
The euro zone Is this really the end? Unless Germany and the ECB move quickly, the single currency’s collapse is looming
EVEN as the euro zone hurtles towards a crash, most people are assuming that, in the end, European leaders will do whatever it takes to save the single currency. That is because the consequences of the euro’s destruction are so catastrophic that no sensible policymaker could stand by and let it happen.
A euro break-up would cause a global bust worse even than the one in 2008-09. The world’s most financially integrated region would be ripped apart by defaults, bank failures and the imposition of capital controls (see article). The euro zone could shatter into different pieces, or a large block in the north and a fragmented south. Amid the recriminations and broken treaties after the failure of the European Union’s biggest economic project, wild currency swings between those in the core and those in the periphery would almost certainly bring the single market to a shuddering halt. The survival of the EU itself would be in doubt.
Idea of civilians using drone aircraft may soon fly with FAA
Drone aircraft, best known for their role in hunting and destroying terrorist hide-outs in Afghanistan, may soon be coming to the skies near you.
Police agencies want drones for air support to spot runaway criminals. Utility companies believe they can help monitor oil, gas and water pipelines. Farmers think drones could aid in spraying their crops with pesticides.
“It’s going to happen,” said Dan Elwell, vice president of civil aviation at the Aerospace Industries Assn. “Now it’s about figuring out how to safely assimilate the technology into national airspace.”