Letters Remain

Category: freedom

  • Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites

    Privacy could become a competitive feature of social networking sites, suggests Bruce Schneier in an article that looks at the interesting topic of privacy salience: the suggestion that privacy reassurances make people more, not less, concerned. Privacy salience does a lot to explain social networking sites and their attitudes towards privacy. From a business perspective,…

  • Prosperity, Freedom, Fertility

    When it comes to reproduction, are individuals who strive only for personal gain—as Adam Smith stated in The Wealth of Nations—”led by an invisible hand […] to promote the public interest”? In The Tragedy of the Commons, ecologist Garrett Hardin suggested not and called for further government intervention to help control rising populations. Recent studies,…

  • Education and Surveillance

    After a school here in the UK installed a CCTV system in a classroom used for the teaching of an A-level politics class the students revolted; walking out only to return once they were reassured that the monitoring system was inactive and to be used solely as a teaching aid. The students’ plight was eventually…

  • Poverty Education

    In an article where the somewhat controversial philosopher Peter Singer—author of Famine, Affluence and Morality—argues that the teaching of the issues surrounding world poverty should not be confined to specialist courses and should be an educational priority*, I was shocked by the clarification of something I’ve oft wondered about the definition of poverty: The World Bank defines extreme…

  • Talk to Strangers

    In an article discussing collaborative spam filtering and the Tor project, Bruce Schneier offers some refreshing advice: telling children not to talk to strangers isn’t strictly the best advice: When I was growing up, children were commonly taught: “don’t talk to strangers.” Strangers might be bad, we were told, so it’s prudent to steer clear…

  • Causes of Poverty and Prosperity

    Matt Ridley—author of The Red Queen, among others—discusses the causes of poverty and prosperity, offering new (to me) insights on innovation, technology and markets. It’s very clear from history that markets bring forth innovation. If you’ve got free and fair exchange with decent property rights and a sufficiently dense population, then you get innovation. […] The…

  • Trends in Counterfeit Currency

    Bruce Schneier comments on the growing prevalence of low-tech currency counterfeiting: “Counterfeits are becoming easier to detect while people are becoming less skilled in detecting it”. Part of the problem, Green said, is that the government has changed the money so much to foil counterfeiting. With all the new bills out there, citizens and even…

  • Corruption in the (Legal) Drug Trade

    Marcia Angell reviews three books for The New York Review of Books and in the process creates an article that acts like an in-depth primer on the whole sordid business of “fraud, undisclosed payments, data burying and off-label promotion that pervades the pharmaceutical industry”. Like David Balan on Overcoming Bias, I felt this was the most damning admission…

  • For-Profit Charities

    Charities should embrace for-profit business models in order to drive fundraising, or so says Dan Pallotta, author of Uncharitable and founder of the now-defunct Pallotta TeamWorks company; a for-profit organisation that produced many successful fundraising events for nonprofits. In his column The Sin of Doing Good Deeds, The New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof…

  • Journal Requires Authors to Submit to Wikipedia

    Despite the growth of open access, most scientific journals are still closed and the access debate rages on. Now, however, the closed access RNA Biology has chosen another option: it requires all scientists submitting an article for publication to also create a Wikipedia article outlining their findings. From the journal’s new submission guidelines: At least…