Interesting Links for 05-12-2011

[andrewducker]

• UC Davis Pepper Spray - What Really Happened
  (tags: police students occupy video protest )
• Anonymised NHS patient data could be given to private firms for science research - (devil, as always, in the details)
  (tags: data nhs privacy )
• Welcome to Armageddon, USA: A Tour of America’s Most Toxic Town
  (tags: usa toxic industry abandoned )
• What Clegg meant by 'getting tough' on bosses pay
  (tags: business uk money libdem )
• Vladimir Putin set to lose majority despite massive electoral fraud.
  (tags: elections democracy russia vladimirputin fraud )
• Attacks take numerous sites offline for reporting Russian election fraud. (Including LJ, of course)
  (tags: livejournal elections ddos russia )
• Sites can work out what other sites you've been to by checking the browser cache.
  (tags: history browser logging privacy )
• Free schools and academies must promote marriage
  (tags: school relationships marriage education )
• Liking a lie-in is genetic
  (tags: genes sleep )
• Scots opinion on Independence depends on whether they think it will make them better off
  (tags: money scotland independence )
• Why doctors have less healthcare at the end of their lives than the rest of us
  (tags: death ethics medicine health )

Comments

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I am reflexively sceptical of "anonymous NHS patient records" - given enough biographical data points, it's possible to uniquely identify a person and very effectively de-anonymise the data. E.g. the combination of your first name, date of birth and post code almost certainly uniquely identifies you. The dates that you went to your doctor are going to be similar.

Once people are identified that way, it can't be undone. It can be applied to old data - a classic retroactive privacy invasion.

[andrewducker]

I think I'd only be comfortable with it if it was done in aggregate, with numbers sufficiently large that a neutral third party of statisticians agreed that it was safe.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

My driving concern is what do private health companies want this data for in the first place.

The only thing I can think of is to do mass profiling, and work out where profits can be made, with an eye towards the NHS being broken up.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Heck, my post code covers two tenement buildings - my age and sex probably identifies me, including my date of birth or first name almost certainly does.

Pepper Spray

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Would be a great name for a porn star. Just saying.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

If you reduce private sector high pay, you increase company profits by an equal amount. Personal taxation is taxed at a higher rate than corporate taxation, so could someone please explain to me how reducing private sector high pay helps the budget deficit?

[chess]

The 'company profits' don't just sit there, they have to go somewhere. The theory is that they would go into more investment, or into dividends or remuneration of other employees etc, some of which is more likely to find their way to less fantastically well-off people (if only via propping up their pension fund) who will then do more taxable in-country spending because less well-off people spend a higher proportion of their wealth domestically.

[chess]

(more investment is good because it produces growth, which even if it doesn't have a direct effect on tax income (which it probably does from extra sales) has an effect on how the markets view the UK as a credit risk, improving govt interest rates and thus also contributing to defecit reduction by reducing interest payments).

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

That actually makes some sense to be fair.


Although I suspect that the main motive for the policy is to throw a bone to the sort of voter (all too common in this country) who is jealous of people earning lots of money, no matter how deserved.

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

Good video of the pepper spraying event. The protesters should never have made it a contest between themselves and the police, it was supposed to be about Wall Street. A better plan would have been to leave, then come back the next day. And keep coming back.

[fearmeforiampink]

Whilst I've not watched the whole thing ('cause it's damn long) I have my doubts on the pepper spray thing being the police being blocked in.

Because if they were, then the people standing around them in a circle would be the ones blocking them off, and thus the ones that it would make sense to spray so they can leave, rather than those sitting.

[andrewducker]

The ones on the path were the ones directly between them and their vehicles. That's what the video shows.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

I find it quite ironic that they were chanting "you use weapons, we use our voice" when the police had tried repeatedly to talk to them.

I'm all for protests, but to have any respect, you need to follow the rules.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

The better off under independance thing is interesting, I can't imagine anybody will be better off, given the massive cost of setting up all of the new insitutions we would need.

The SNPs plan of just borrowing the money we need calls to mind an Irish/Icelandic/Greek nightmare of a future.

I would, for sure, keep my money in Sterling.

[tobyaw]

Since high earners pay a larger percentage of their income as tax than low earners, wouldn't curbing executive pay have a negative impact on the government's tax income?

I would have thought that people earning lots, as long as they pay tax on it, is a good thing for all of us.

[andrewducker]

It would certainly raise more taxes in the immediate sense - whether it causes a healther economy in the longer term, I don't know.

(Also, see similar discussion further up)

[anef.livejournal.com]

I'm all for bankers paying 50% tax on their bonuses. But my suspicion is that there are an awful lot of tax avoidance schemes in existence that mean that they will pay considerably less (nothwithstandng the best efforts of HMRC). Also, very high earners will get large wodges put into their pension schemes (no tax) and are likely to get bonuses in share scheme shares which are taxed at capital gains rates not income tax rates. And of course it puts money into tax advisers' pockets.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

The browser cache thing totally failed here (firefox latest, OS X).
It came up grey for Facebook despite FB being opened right there and then in another tab!

[andrewducker]

Good news! So long as that kind of thing isn't reliable, businesses won't depend on it!

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Is that thing about the cache new to anyone?

All of my porn clients use programs to do that - because by finding out what sites they were on before they came to our sites we can often figure out what fetishes and stuff they are interested in and tailor our content and develop new sites based on that.

For example for one of our gay sites we noticed that a lot of visitors were coming to it after reading stories about watersports on ASSTR and Literotica, so we created a section of the site with guys pissing on each other and added that as an option in the "preferences" section of their dating profiles.

Even non porn sites do this. For a Thailand travel site I was working on we noticed that a lot of people were coming to it after visiting ladyboy sites, so we added sections to the sites talking about ladyboys and started taking ads from ladyboy escort services.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

The technology used to determine the browser's history matters.

The least controversial way to do it is by checking the HTTP-REFERER header sent by the browser, which only works if they followed a direct link from the source page to your site.

More controversially, if both your site and the source site use the same ad network, you may be able to find out other pages your users visit through the ad network's control panel. This data is correlated by the ad network storing a cookie or something more sophisticated on the user's computer in order to uniquely track them.

Explicitly scouring the user's cache to find out the sites they visit is problematic, and is the category of techniques that browsers have increasingly been trying to lock down and eliminate.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

Ben Goldacre is very keen on Cameron's announcement about sharing NHS data with private life science companies, judging by the excitement in his Twitter feed: @bengoldacre

[andrewducker]

Thanks for that - gave me the opportunity to play with Storify!

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

" 1. to make shareholder votes on remuneration packages for directors binding, rather than advisory (as is the case now);
2. to force big companies to include an employee representative on the committee that sets directors' pay (the remuneration committee);
3. to force companies to publish the ratio of senior directors' pay to the typical or median pay in the company, and even (perhaps) to prohibit pay rises that bust a mandated threshold for that ratio."

These are reforms? I would have characterised them as a half-arsed joke, but okay. Aside from the very last bit about a mandated threshold for the ration, which is theoretically a great idea but in practice is still rather too influenced by some companies with bloated management.

[andrewducker]

There's not very much there at all, is there?