The front page of Wikipedia today links to an article about the Brown Dog Affair – an incident that occured 100 years ago involving the dissection of a dog at labs in UCL, my old university. I’d never heard of this story before today, who’d have thought you could actually learn something from the internet.
Archive for the ‘Society’ Category
Riots, vivisection, brown dogs
Monday, December 10th, 2007Everything I ever wanted to get accross about farm subsidies
Monday, December 10th, 2007The Economist sums it up more succinctly than I’ve ever managed to:
Most of the [agricultural] subsidies and trade barriers have come at a huge cost. The trillions of dollars spent supporting farmers in rich countries have led to higher taxes, worse food, intensively farmed monocultures, overproduction and world prices that wreck the lives of poor farmers in the emerging markets. And for what? Despite the help, plenty of Western farmers have been beset by poverty. Increasing productivity means you need fewer farmers, which steadily drives the least efficient off the land.
Read the full story, here
A new ebay scam
Monday, August 13th, 2007So right now I am selling loads of stuff on ebay, that I won’t bore you with the details of. One of the items is a 60GB ipod, which I had an offer for via email. The potential buyer wanted me to give them £250 for the ipod. They were happy to accept Paypal, but they didn’t want to buy the item using Buy it Now. This must be enough to set alarm bells ringing. Why would someone want to take a payment through Paypal and pay Paypal fees, but not want the additional protection of buying though an official Ebay channel. Come to think of it, why would you want to buy a two year old ipod for £250? This is what ‘Paypal’ have to say:
This message is originated from paypal company.We have received an order from our client “(Eric Smith)”eric.smith001@yahoo.com regarding the payment made to your paypal account.
The payment has been successfully made but due to security reason we have to receive the shipment tracking number before the next 24 hours for the processing of your order.
This a new measure we are taking to protect both our sellers and buyers against fraudulent customers.
Once you have shipped the item send us the shipment tracking number for verification after the number has verify your account will be credited instantly.
Please. Just ask yourself a few basic questions.
Thankfully, I am not an idiot. Whether its idiocy or pure greed or a mixture of both that lures people into these kind of scams, I don’t know. Its probably a mixture of both. Is it the case that people simply fail to apply every day reasoning when confronted with a computer? The message box asks you ‘Is your printer plugged into LPT1′. You don’t know what LPT1 is, but then who cares. If you were confronted with the question ‘Is your car parked in a schmler?’, you could reasonably answer, ‘No. My car is in a car park. What is a schmler?’.
But a quick buck is different – it seems to bypass any form of reason – and this applies as much within computing as it does within every other aspect of life. ‘I want what Dave has, so I’m going to get a credit card with 40% APR to buy it. When I default, its everyone else’s fault, because they didn’t stop this from happening to me’.
Suddenly, an individuals inability to grasp the concept of compound, damn, even simple interest rates is a reflection on a decaying society – the ‘fault’ of the credit providers who back up entire economies, or the magical internet that eats children for breakfast and steals you money via Paypal.
So fuck the morons who fall for this. If people want to give their money to eric.smith001@yahoo.com who will buy your piece of shit ipod for £250, or Eric Smith the guy in the pub who has a load of Rolex’s that fell off the back of the lorry, or Eric Smith the mortgage lender who will let you buy the house and give you 110% of its value, then let them. Its the thoughtless, fuckwitted greed of people who buy into these scams who cause the problems. Kill the demand and the supply will disappear.
Pay to learn and increase your value – why tuition fees are a good thing
Friday, April 20th, 2007Last night I was talking to some lecturers from University College London about the impact of compulsory tuition fees that were recently introduced by the university. The results are interesting. The archaeology department, where I studied at the between 2000 – 2003, used to attract about 100 undergraduate students per year, most of whom came from the EU and paid just over £1000 in tuition fees. Since introducing a higher, but still mostly flat rate, fee of £3000, the numbers of undergraduate archaeology students has fallen to around 70 per year. This is the best thing that has happened to archaeology since the drop forged trowel.
Archaeology is the lowest paid profession in the UK, and probably in the world. There are numerous factors that contribute to its lowly status; the separation of academic (well paid, clean, offices, think a lot) and field (badly paid, dirty, huts, do a lot) archaeologists; the status of commercial archaeology as a nice-to-have-but-not-really-necessary requirement of development and an over supply of skilled labour.
Because universities have in the past charged nothing or very little in the way of fees, prospective students are not encouraged to consider the financial implications of their decisions. A whole load of people study archaeology, presumably because it is interesting, and then become accountants. The effect of this as a massive oversupply of labour at the graduate level, that archaeology companies in the UK ruthlessly exploit. By ruthless I mean that they sack their staff before Christmas to avoid paying holiday pay (Oxford Archaeology to name just one).
I would predict that as universities charge more and more for degree courses, and eventually charge different amounts for different courses (effectively liberalising the market) fewer and fewer people will chose to study archaeology. This will increase the value of those who are already qualified and those who are studying to become qualified. Wages will rise accordingly, starting at the bottom of the stack and working its way up. The market value of archaeologists will reflect their skill level, enthusiasm and dedication. The workforce will be happier and more productive, as they will feel valued, so the real costs to employers will drop (they’ll get more work done for their money). The quality of archaeology carried out in the UK, which is often very high, but sometimes abysmal (email me and I’ll give you a long list), will also rise, as students will be better trained and because companies like Oxford Archaeology will not be able to get away with firing their staff over Christmas, or employing people of 6 week contracts and will have to provide professional training to all of their staff (rather than the boss’s friends). There will also be a lower drop out rate from the profession. A lot of dedicated, talented people with years of experience, drop out of archaeology because they are so frustrated with being paid a pittance and treated like morons. They know they are worth more than £7.50 an hour, so they join other professions. Those who stay behind are destined to a life of very enjoyable, challenging, varied, skilled work alongside some of the most interesting and intelligent people you could hope to meet – and then a state pension and arthritis, or if they are unlucky they might develop diabetes and be fired when they are too blind to work (yep, good old OA again. All this because of the insanity of the current higher education system.
Its broke, it needs fixing, its in the process of being fixed. Lets see how things pan out.
Don’t worry about unexploded bombs
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007There’s a lot of trash on TV, and the news on BBC 1 is no exception. Near to top of the heap is BBC Regional news, which seems to strive to achieve mediocrity and still fall short of its own mark. The BBC London news this evening lead with an article about unexploded WWII bombs that litter the Olympic site in East London. The article is one in a long line of attempts by the media to trash the Olympics in London – some more deservedly than others. I personally don’t really care about the Olympics being in London. I probably won’t go and watch any of the games, I don’t own property in the East end of London, my work isn’t really related to the Olympics and the wider economic benefits of the Games seem to to be marginal at the best.
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East London
With all the aspects of the London Olympics that can be criticised its no suprise that the chronically unimaginative drudge of the media have resorted to such rampant bad-mouthing. This article gives a slightly more balanced view regarding the issue – but still falls short of the mark. Take the leading paragraph:
Unexploded World War II bombs may be buried under the east London 2012 Olympic Games site, BBC London has learned
This is not news. If its taken BBC 1 journalists this long to figure out that there are unexploded bombs in east London, then the Corporation needs to raise its recruitment standards. The truth is that most urban areas in Britain’s industrial cities are littered with unexploded bombs. There were, after all, several years of intense aerial warfare over the skies of Britain. Unexploded bombs rarely explode. When they do, its usually because a piling rig drills into them; its really hard for human action to set off an unexploded bomb. Risk assessments are carried out by construction companies (who stand to loose lots of money if the negligently allow bombs to explode) who employ ex-Armed Forces personnel who work on medium to high-risk sites all the time that there are construction personnel present. This is not an issue that is related to the Olympics in London – it is related to any form of construction in most urban areas in Britain.
Money != Food
Friday, March 16th, 2007This morning’s news that UK households throw away one third of the food that they purchase has been met with commentary about “wasting” food and money. It does not follow that an individual who throws away food wastes more money than a person who does not throw away food. First off, in all but the rarest of occasions in western society, foodstuffs loose their market value once they are purchased from the retailer (I once sold some dog food on ebay, but this in an edge case). Next, there is an assumption that if someone does not throw away food, they must spend less money than someone who does throw food away. This position fails to take into account numerous factors – the travel costs and time costs associated with making frequent shopping trips – that if counted will help to level the balance sheet. Finally, can we not simply conclude that people who throw away food place a higher value on factors other than food waste (mininising the time they spend in supermarkets for example)?
The real issue here is the burden of Local and National Governments to remove the waste. So why not charge people per kilo of rubbish discarded, incentivising the individual to produce less waste, rather than continually blaming the mysterious corporations and misleading people into believing they can accumulate more of the paper stuff by throwing less food away?
Isle of Man leads the way
Monday, February 26th, 2007Not something you read everyday perhaps? The BBC reports that one in three adminssion of under 16s to the Island’s A&E department are alcohol related. That seems quite a lot of boozed up youngsters. How things have changed since my day, when we used to fly kites in the fields and only went to A&E for scrapes on our knees. Read on further and discovert that:
… in 2004/5 22 children were admitted for alcohol-related conditions, with a further 50 having conditions attributable to alcohol, such as injuries.
Then reverse engineer the number to discover that approximately 210 children were admitted to A&E during the year, for alcohol related injuries. Just so you know this all fits into the bigger picture, here’s some demographics: