I just finished reading Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God – a diatribe about the way in which 1990s business writers (particularly the prophets of the new economy) tried to assert that the changes in business practices then (casualisation, outsourcing etc) were inevitable and could not and should not be challenged. I found the book somewhat irritating because it was hectoring and repetitious but one or two of the footnotes were interesting.

The paper Family Income Mobility– How Much Is There and Has It Changed? [a PDF] by Peter Gottschalk and Sheldon Danziger was particularly interesting as it provides empirical evidence for what is generally just “folk wisdom” (at least in left wing circles). It concludes that in the US:

“even though there is substantial income mobility, the extent of mobility has not increased over this period. As a result, the gaps between those at the top and those at the bottom have widened and remained at least as persistent as they were in the 1970’s.”

Also (based on earlier research not available online)

“The fact that the US has a less-regulated, more decentralized labor market than the Nordic countries or Germany has not generated greater economic mobility here, either in earnings or family income. Likewise, the more extensive systems of social protection in the European countries have yielded lower poverty and lower family income inequality, but not at the cost of lower mobility.”

It seems from the data provided that 80% of people who were in the highest quintile of earnings in 1968-70 remained there in 1989-91 while of those who started in the lowest quintile, 31% remained there and 25.4% only rose to the next highest (the actual argument is a little more complex so if you want to really dig into the figures I recommend you look at the PDF).

I also ran across an international comparison of poverty and income inequality which included some interesting charts of how much inequality there was in a number of nations including several European countries, Canada and the US, in the 1980s and 1990s and how much difference taxes made to reducing inequality.

UK-based webloggers should know that the VoxPolitics crowd are doing a seminar:

Can Weblogs Change Politics?

14th July, 5:30 – 7.00pm
Portcullis House, Houses of Parliament (room tbc)
Drinks and Food Provided

Speakers
Steven Clift, e-democracy expert
Stephen Pollard, Blogging Journalist,
Pernille Rudlin, Mobile expert
Tom Watson MP, Blogging MP
James Crabtree, Chair

Dunno if I can make it myself but I expect the usual suspects will turn up and I will be interested to read what comes out of it. I do hope it won’t turn into a “aren’t weblogs wonderful” love-in..sprint ringtone sanyo 3g free5500 ringtone sanyoringtones 6340ifree nokia 6360 ringtoneblackberry free ringtone 7250download 8900 audiovox ringtone93 ringtone till infinityjobs warrington manager payable accounts in Map

Test.org pointed me to this entertaining collection of turn of the 20th C postcards predicting what life would be like in a hundred years. I’m still waiting increasingly impatiently for my personal flying machine (and it doesn’t seem to have come much closer!)advance cash illinois loanloan 2007 home maximum valoan advance feefees advance loanfast cash loan america secured inproperty 100 loan for commercialadvance no credit cash check loanloans realestate aaainterest loans only of advantagescash fast loan online advance

On my recent trip to Venice I saw this work by David Della Venezia at the BAC Art Studio and as I am about to spend three years of my life for the most part surrounded by books doing a PhD I thought/feared this would be a useful picture/warning to stick by my desk!repayment 401k wachovia loanloan payday interest $500loans $500.00payments loans month $200,000 660alfred foundation sloanloans 100 fix and nj fliphome refinance fico 500 loantile loans car aaaloan company services financial americanafs credit improvement loanloans installment online 100 approved5 3 home bank loansloan 5000 dollar from commercea loan from millionares$2500 dollar loanloan 403badvantage loan student alaskahome loan americandream Map

Dr Duncan Watts, the principal investigator for the Small World Research Project (looking at online social networks) was interviewed by Odyssey on WBEZ back in February as part of an hour-long program about network theory. He said in the course of conversation that his results so far suggest that contrary to popular belief (and my own preconceptions), social networks (at least in his experiment) are pretty egalitarian – the most well-connected people are not as important to the overall network as he thought. I don’t see any links to published results on the Small World site, though – has anyone heard any more about what he found?

Researchers have found that good information doesn’t always drown out bad in recommender systems. In fact, the research done by the creators of movielens shows if you give (for example) a movie a higher rating than it “deserves” other people will also be inclined to give it a high rating. So “innocent” people will unconsciously “play along” with people trying to influence the system and reinforce their dirty work. Unfortunately for the creators of recommender systems, users will notice when overall a recommender system’s results are poor. The writers of the academic paper (available in full here) suggest one way to avoid this problem would be to hide the rating of a film from users who want to rate it themselves so they aren’t influenced by others’ ratings.

I didn’t find collaborative filtering useful when I did use it, but that was nearly ten years ago when the MIT Media Lab was playing about with what became Firefly. Perhaps if my DVD Recorder was smarter and networked with other such recorders to compare my TV/film preferences with others’ without my needing to enter the details by hand it would have enough data to be able to adequately predict my viewing tastes. Personally I suspect mine are atypical enough that it would be difficult to predict what I would like mathematically. Then again, most people probably think they are unique in this respect!

I plan to devote the next few years of my life to pursuing a PhD examining various aspects of how people’s use of the Internet can help people to feel better about themselves and build their social networks (or why they don’t use the Internet in this way and how they might be encouraged to).

According to this satirical report, the online social capital revolution has already arrived and it’s all happening on Amazon and epinions.

“…While some online reviewers give little more than basic pros-and-cons of a product or a one- to five-star rating, many use the write-ups as a vital means of self-expression, providing in-depth anecdotes about their own experiences with a particular product, or even their autobiography. On Amazon.com, some reviewers create deeply personal Listmania! lists, such as “The Best Kung Fu Movies Ever” or “Things You Absolutely Need To Survive Working In A Cubicle.”

“Through these product reviews, in which we fulfill our collective desire to guide our fellow humans to good purchasing decisions, a sense of community emerges,” Piersall said. “But just as important, a sense of self emerges. By publicly expressing our feelings about the Coleman Quickbed air mattress, we tell people not merely about this product, but about ourselves.”

With reviews running the gamut from commentary on the Criterion Collection DVD of Fellini’s 8 1/2 to the usefulness of a portable Weber propane gas grill versus the traditional full-size standup model, Piersall said that ‘once again, we are talking.’…

Although the Onion exaggerates for effect, I would actually argue the basic point is right – that people becoming self-appointed experts on Espresso makers (whether on weblogs, personal web pages or via product review sites) may indeed increase their feelings of self-worth.

There was an article not long ago (though I can’t remember the address, unfortunately) which talked about how being “star reviewers” at sites like Amazon and epinions has changed people’s lives.

If all goes according to plan, in three years or so I will likely become a lecturer in that much-maligned subject, media studies. An article in The Times does not fill me with hope of bringing enlightenment to keen young minds, however. A correspondent who taught a journalism course at Thames Valley University (an ex-polytechnic, I believe) found standards not high:

Of nearly 60 students, only a couple had ever picked up a broadsheet. A handful occasionally bought the Daily Mail and Evening Standard. About a dozen read The Sun and Daily Mirror — and the news pages were invariably skipped through in favour of showbiz and sport. The most popular daily newspaper turned out to be the freebie Metro…

…One student thought that Scotland’s biggest city was Newcastle. Another reckoned Russia’s currency is the dollar.

There is a small upside, however – “Over the past six years, the number of British students accepted on to media studies university courses has risen by nearly 50 per cent”. So there should be plenty of room for advancement!

I just learned about his sudden death via a mailing list I subscribe to. Take a look though the list of publications on his site (many of them available in full text) to get an idea of the many contributions he made to the understanding of the social impacts of computing. It’s sad he won’t be able to provide any more similar insights.

Seyla Benhabib: Democracy and Difference

This collection of academic essays contains short essays by all of the the main people I have come across who problematise deliberative democracy including Habermas, Young, Mouffe, Phillips and Mansbridge and an excellent defense of deliberative democracy from Benhabib herself (“Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy”).