Foreign Policy and the Centre for Global Development have produced an interesting “generosity league table” which balances rich countries’ aid, trade, investment and environmental policies to measure their overall effect on poorer nations. (I think it’s a mistake to put in a measure of environmental impact alongside the other straight economic measures, but let that pass).

Japan, which I always thought of as one of the good guys (it was until recently the largest foreign aid donor) turns out to be at the bottom of their league table because they don’t welcome foreign goods or workers and the large past aid loans are balanced by large debt repayments by poor countries.

Turns out the most generous countries are Denmark and the Netherlands and (to my surprise) Portugal, New Zealand and Switzerland. The UK is, “Consistently middling across categories, and dead center—11th—in the overall standings” while Canada’s extensive participation in peacekeeping operations is undercut by low aid and high greenhouse gas emissions – it ends up just 18th out of the 21 countries surveyed. The US is second lowest of developed countries – only Japan scores worse.

Of course you could change the weightings and come up with a different league table but still I think this table is thought provoking.one monitoring 3 in creditscore one 3 credit inneed credit american consumerstax 2007 federal creditaccreditation healthand credit services education americaneducation accounting credit5 card credit start Maptechnician psychiatric in schools california accreditedonline aba degree accredited lawcredit affinity in mn unionsunion utah america ogden credit firstchase aarp card credit bankarea cosmetic accredited in bay dentistveterinarian at-home degrees accreditedcredit american personal card express Map

Not only is the idea of missile defense unworkable (and irrelevant, since missles are not nearly as worrying as other nuke delivery means, and destabilising if other countries become afraid that it might work) but it is emerging that even the Pentagon admits the program is in trouble according to this article in Slate.

Apparently, the Missile Defense Agency has suspended the space-based kinetic-energy boost-phase interceptor (one of the program’s most crucial components) on the grounds that the technology it involves is “not mature enough” to fund.

Yet Bush’s budget asks for $9.1 billion next year and even more in subsequent years to continue research…authority alabama finance loan department housingk loan interest rate 401mortgage loan 500 scoresupplemental alaska loansapplications 1003 loanloans access and software store accountscash application loan application advance paydayloan conforming 2007 limitsagri loansstated loans 100 subprimesex having amateurs18 eighteenteens 100street 8th analia latinas8teenboy bradley riversnineteen orwell george 1984 eighty-four videophotos sexy alicia keysagainst teen curfews Map

I was wondering when this issue would start receiving some attention. A recent survey discovered that on average 17 percent of “permission-based” marketing messages are “erroneously” tagged as spam by ISP spam filters and are therefore never seen by their intended recipients. I would imagine that at least some of that is due to large numbers of people tagging email as spam that comes to them because of dubious definitions of “permission” (where companies have passed on details of their addresses to other “partners” for example). It’s noteable that 46 percent of email from “catalogers” (whoever they are?) is bounced on average compared to less than 1% of non-profit email so I expect some of the email bounced arguably deserved to be.

Nonetheless this is a serious problem and may become more so over time if spam volumes continue to rise and more people start to rely increasingly on technical “fixes”. The problem is, of course, that people who really do want to receive some bulk-delivered email – notifications of special offers they requested, for example, or even political communications – will end up missing it and won’t even know it happened. That’s why I believe carefully-phrased legal solutions to spam will in the end be better solutions to the problem than technical “fixes”.

Some suggest spammers (who are mostly in the US – and apparently mostly in Florida) will simply move overseas to avoid regulation but I believe only a hard core will be willing to live with the disruption to their lives and businesses that moving overseas to a country without anti-spam laws would cause. Anyway it has to be worth at least trying to lessen irresponsible bulk emailing using the law.

Thanks to this Techdirt thread for the heads-up

Take a look at this BusinessWeek article about The Digital Divide That Wasn’t.

1) It concentrates on the digital divide within the US – outside the west there’s still a huge digital divide.

2) Internet access at a public school terminal or in a community centre is not comparable to Internet access at your convenience at home.

3) Digital divide isn’t mainly a race question – it’s an income and education issue – “When he controlled for education and income, he found that broadband had been deployed more rapidly in minority areas than in white neighborhoods over the past two years.” Sure – but if minorities are predominantly poorer and less educated the effect is the same.

4) It correctly identifies that 42% of Americans don’t go online but states (without showing any statistical evidence) that “the divide that does exist between the Web and non-Web proficient is no longer defined simply by income, gender, race, or education.” Well, not simply by those factors – but they are still important factors. The key factor they miss is that choosing not to be interested in the Internet is probably itself a choice linked to lower education.

Take a look at this table:

and you can see clearly that all kinds of divides still exist even in the US.henati moviesholes movie soundtrack thehollywood rentals movieporno homemade moviesfigures horror movie actionwavs horror moviehsu jade moviesjameson jenna lesbian galleries movies andmovie jennifer nude connellynude jill movies schoelen

Yesterday I handed in my dissertation – my MSc in New Media, Information and Society is now officially over and in a month and a half I return to the LSE to start a PhD in Media and Communications. Here’s the abstract of my dissertation, which I hope to turn into a published paper later. I am also keen to summarise the results for a non-academic audience for a thinktank or newspaper so if it sounds interesting, give me a call!

Civil society campaigning organizations have an important role to play in the public sphere according to deliberative democratic theory. The new communicative capabilities offered to such organizations by the Internet in recent years must be evaluated in the light of a digital divide that has persisted even in developed countries. This study measures and attempts to explain patterns of Internet usage among activists, and examines the possible implications of these choices for the public sphere and political participation.

Drawing on a postal survey of 109 London-based activists and open-ended interviews with four of those surveyed, respondents were found to have predominantly high levels of education, higher than average incomes and high levels of access to the Internet consistent with those factors. However, high levels of access did not translate into high levels of use in all contexts.
While email was extensively employed, other uses like participation in open online discussion or web-based publishing were much less prevalent than traditional campaigning activity. Some access and skill barriers were noted but the principal barrier to greater use of the web in campaigning appeared to be a perceived lack of its relevance or importance in that context. The fact that much Internet use by activists is via email and therefore tends to be “invisible” except to participants in the dialogue might contribute to that perceived lack of relevance.

The study also suggests that the existing socio-economic divide between the “core” activists surveyed and the broader public could be accentuated if, for reasons of efficiency, those activists moved their attention away from traditional activities like meetings and newsletters towards email-mediated dialogue or if the Internet does make it easier for the relatively privileged who are already online to become more involved at the expense of those who continue to fall on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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Another gem from my “blog this one day” archive – Sir Clive Sinclair, who created one of the first attempts at a mass market electric transport – the ill-fated C5 – has told the BBC he plans a successor – details as yet un-specified. Good to see someone still plugging away at alternative transport solutions. I don’t suppose it could be much less practical than the Segway!rugby accrington leaguenokia verizon ringtone free 6015ibasketball adam harringtongirls 21st century ringtone2way ringtoneabsolutely country free ringtones wireless cingularfree 3595 ringtone nokia logocingular a split second ringtone Mapand credit consumer of disadvantages advantagesbarbados in agency accreditationrealtor accredited professional stagingexpress american card credit travel rewardsteam credit agricole cycling 2006accredited reo home loanscredit express earning true card americanpersonal acredited training certifications Map

The new version of ICQ Lite can now also send messages to AOL and AIM users. Pity it’s the “lite” version and not the “Pro” version. I hope they update “Pro” to do that too – it might be what I need to make me ditch Trillian.

Dr Duncan Watts a social network scholar who I blogged earlier appearing on the radio in the US back in June has turned up on the excellent Thinking Allowed programme on Radio 4. He’s flogging his book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. If you listen in you can also take part in a little psychological experiment…for credit loans 125 home fairair canada cards miles creditpower uniom alabama creditaccept accept verification id credit cardcredits pirates end after worldscredit approved cards 100adult acreditation educationand loans adverse mortgages credit Map

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo recently produced an interesting piece on the battle between cable companies and big tech companies over equal access to content over broadband cable.

As I commented on Eszter Hargittai‘s blog entry this issue appears at first to be a straightforward one – cable industry bad, free access good. But there are sound business and technical reasons why some forms of discrimination between different forms of content may be useful. For example, for good video quality cable companies want to put stuff in servers directly connected to their networks. But they can’t afford to put all streaming video content there so they may want to cut deals with certain providers. Is that unfair to the other providers? Internet users would still be able to see their stuff – just not as well.

Cable companies might also want to charge users who want to stream stuff from their “non-preferred” suppliers but keep “preferred supplier” content free (or lower cost). But while discriminatory the practice would also be fair, since the cable cos would be incurring different costs depending on where the content they were streaming came from.

Perhaps all legislation should do is demand open bidding for content deals and that per-Gb charges should have some proven relationship to the cost of providing bandwidth.calculator loan table amortizationestate ag real loansloans amortization bankmortgage get amc loan outhome loans guardian americanok loan sacramento cash payday advance$88 car loansbaltimore loans 100 investoradversary proceeding student loansexpert loaned servant alabama issues doctrinealpena alcona unions creditcredit rating advantis union financialcredit abc warehouse appliance storeaenima creditscredit card blogspot com accept e2for accreditation center detention youthon abet accredited lineabc card credit appliance warehouse Map

An MSNBC investigation shows that although big companies themselves may not spam they don’t seem to do much to prevent affiliates from spamming on their behalf and passing the results on as sales leads at $10-20 per respondent.payday companies 6 4 advance loanloan payday 5 free 7loan 500 personal57 loans student6 payday 8 loan 123personal loan 6 easy loan paydaycalifornia officers loan certification 63 3fast pay payday loan 8 day Map