Letters Remain

Month: October 2009

  • CCTV Prevalence in Britain

    For many years the British public has often been told that the United Kingdom has 4.2 million CCTV cameras—that’s one for every fourteen residents—as widely quoted by politicians, various media, and even the police. This statistic is rarely questioned, but thanks to a recent episode of the excellent More or Less (UK-only?) suggesting that this…

  • Twleve Tips for Staying Alive

    Dr. Doug McGuff is an emergency physician in South Carolina. From this perspective, he has compiled a list of twelve tips on avoiding what he calls ‘negative Black Swan events’—an early death from things we consider unlikely (but are all-too-common to emergency physicians). Drive the biggest vehicle you can afford to drive. Never get on…

  • The Deadweight Loss of Gift Vouchers

    Of the $92 billion spent on gift vouchers in the U.S. last year, $6 billion was lost to fees and unused cards. In response to this, the U.S. Credit Card Act now bans fees on vouchers that have been dormant for less than 12 months and expiration dates of less than five years from the…

  • Purchasing Green a Licence to Steal, Cheat

    Just as a salad option on a menu increases the incidence of unhealthy orders, and national park visitors are less likely to support conservation charities later in life (as compared to hikers or backpackers), now buying green has been shown to increase bad behaviour. It’s not all bad, though: merely being exposed to green products…

  • Rewards Corrupt Altruistic Tendencies

    It has been known for decades that infants up to 14 months old will act on altruistic impulses without reward. Recent research, following on from a similar 1973 study, is starting to show that rewards could be responsible for the inhibition of this natural desire to help others—an innate altruism. 48 German toddlers averaging 20…

  • Quiting Google

    As someone who works in IT (or on the fringes of it, at least), a job at Google is seen as the Holy Grail of positions: if it’s not going to be a job for life, it’ll at least set you up for it—after all, who wouldn’t want to hire Google alumni, right? And the…

  • The Health Care Debate To Date

    For the health care debate that has been raging in America of late, I have subscribed to the same philosophy as Ben Casnocha: I’ve decided I’m just going to read it about once it’s resolved. You can’t keep up with everything. Rather than lightly follow along and skim articles and pretend to be informed, I’m…

  • The Over-Estimation of Sampling Errors

    Fairly obvious, but something I haven’t previously given much consideration to: Sampling errors mean that initial figures are equally as likely to be under-estimates as over-estimates but [in media stories where figures for a disease or condition are quoted] we only ever seem to be told that the condition is under-detected. That’s from a short post…

  • The Ideal News/Media Outlet

    Describing his new rules of news, Dan Gillmore provides 22 rules that he would insist upon if he ran a news/media outlet (and, in turn, describes what many would believe to be the ideal news organisation). This particularly caught my eye: We would replace PR-speak and certain Orwellian words and expressions with more neutral, precise…

  • Common Misconceptions About Iran(ians)

    Ten common misconceptions people of the West have about Iran and its inhabitants, as compiled by Juan Cole, president of the Global American Institute, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and author of Engaging the Muslim World: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the US. Iran is…