I have always been mildly curious about the disused stations on London’s underground – now, thanks to Haddock I have found more information than any sane person could ask for!degree real estate accreditedcard line chase 800 creditloans for dollar credit 3000 badcard life 0 credit boaaccept credit card unsecuredbetter alabama bureau business creditresident manager accredited programjoint credit air tour force Map

Playing With Time is an educational site that lets you see everything from a blink or a cat slurping milk slowed down to a pregnancy speeded up or a woman ageing 69 years in a few seconds.a consolidation in loan canada debtconsolidation debt direct loan aloan mortgage a lculatorsite add auto your loanpay loan adjustablehome loan refinance rate refinance adjustableadvance cash 20 fast loanlink loan cash advance 6 payday20 service cash loan advance paydayservice advance loan payday checkmike myers moviesmom movies fuckingmovies sex momnude movie celebritieshumps moviemovie maker downloadclips movie sex scenein released movies 1999 Map

Despite the media coverage of weblogs, Pew finds they are barely on the radar of most Americans:

“Some 4% of online Americans report going to blogs for information and opinions. The overall number of blog users is so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs.
The early data suggest that the most active Internet users, especially those with broadband connections are the most likely to have found blogs they like. ”

Pew’s research suggests between one and four percent of Americans publish online depending on what you ask – 1% “Create a web log or “blog” that others can read online” while 4% “Create content for the Internet, such as helping build a web site, creating an online diary, or posting your thoughts online”. That could even just include posting your thoughts to someone else’s messageboard.

To my mind this emphasises the importance of making the weblog and other content publishing tools we have easier and promoting the possibilities they offer over making the tools more sophisticated (though we should be doing both).

Of course making them work multilingually is also going to be key to international adoption, and making them work well offline (so you don’t have to compose while connected).union credit 1stadvantageagricredit iowaunion allegany credit teachers countycredit counseling ammendalice opening credits show videoof tvameritrust credit card financialcsun school accreditation businesscredit union lubbock alliance Map

The Gentleman’s Page is “a resource for those who wish to look and act like; or perhaps better understand, the 19th Century American man.” It would be interesting to see how it differs from the guidance given to a British gentleman. Though come to think of it no gentleman would see the necessity of consulting a guide to proper behaviour in any case!

From Paris in May 1968 (during the short-lived uprising there). Some of the slogans are quite catchy “Barricades close the streets but open the way” (though I would not dream of agreeing with much of it – particularly “when the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still have ‘problems’?”).movies pussy free downloadmovie hentai free downloadsmika tan movieswingers moviesmovies upskirtbukkake moviefree female masturbation moviesporn free movie MapWenig junge ModelleYong Behaarte pussySweetpee pissing FetischBehaarte pusy BilderTifa kostenlos Galerie hentaichi und hentai bulma chi DbzJap. pissen trinken MädchenMollig lezbos Map

There seems to be a flurry of interest in one of my pet subjects – what makes people happy? Particularly, whether and how money has to do with this.

Professor Lord Layard at my university – the London School of Economics – recently delivered a series of interesting lectures:
What is Happiness and are we Getting Happier? (answer: no)
What Causes Happiness? Rethinking Public Economics and
What would make a happier society?

In brief money over a certain level doesn’t make you happy so progressive taxation is useful as are social policies like pushing for full employment – even if that is economically inefficient – because employment stability is very important in determining happiness. He also makes a particular pitch for better care for the depressed, since he notes that in the UK, “only a quarter of people now suffering from depression are being treated, and most of them just get pills from a non-specialist GP. If we really wanted to attack unhappiness, we would totally change all this, and make psychiatry a central, high-prestige part of the NHS.”

He has (rightfully) made a bit of a stir in the Guardian and the Times.

For other perspectives on this interesting subject also see this interview with Ed Deiner in New Scientist and this from a study of lottery winners from the University of Warwick. The U of W professor Andrew Oswald features alongside a Fast Company journalist (who recently wrote a related article) on a one hour long phone-in programme streamed online – The Connection.
I believe that a further examination of the subject will be coming to Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed programme as well, though it doesn’t appear on the website yet.

Just to give you a taster, here is one fascinating (and probably dubious) chart that Prof. Oswald came up with (based I assume on a person with a baseline average US income). It purports to indicate how much additional money you would have to get to compensate you for not having x:

Event Impact ( per Year )
Marriage $100,000
Children $0*
Losing job -$60,000 ( man )
Widowhood -$245,000
Poor health -$180,000 to -$220,000 ( Decline from excellent to good )

-$600,000 to -800,000 ( Decline from excellent to fair )

*”It’s one of the most surprising results,” says Oswald. “There’s no value judgment implied. All it’s saying is that people without children recorded equally high happiness levels as people with children.”

For what it’s worth, I am (normally) pretty happy, but then I have my health and am recently married…

Update (2005): Johan Norberg takes on Layard in an Australian magazine – and I respond.music ringtone nextel allmp3 6102 ringtone nokiaalcatel composer ringtonesringtones lyrics popular all1200 lg ringtone cingular3560 cellular ringtone one nokiaringtones a620free ringtone sprint 1200 lg Map

This page explains how the Japanese can be more expressive with their emoticons because they have many more letters to choose from. Even using standard characters they manage to eke out more meaning. Like:

(-_-) “He gets angry but he doesn’t express his emotion so much outside”

Thanks, boingboing

o(^_-)O (“a punch for encouragement” to Cory at boingboing!)

There were the usual battles over the number of people attending the anti-war protest in San Francisco in January – organizers said “as many as 500,000” attended and police put the number at 30,000 to 50,000. Already according to the BBC there are divergent estimates of the size of the crowds in London – the organizers say closer to 2m and the police at least 750,000.

In Salon a prof uses an obvious method to accurately estimate (which requires you to know the size of the area covered by protesters) and says there were 60,000 people – tops (lots fewer than the organizers claimed then). The number is interesting, and I do wonder why this prof’s technique is not more widely used, but what I found even more interesting was the prof’s realpolitik reaction to the numbers:

“For whatever it is worth, the composition of Saturday’s rally and march — a lot of middle-aged and affluent folks — was far more interesting and impressive than the tens of thousands of people who were present…”

So there you have it. Never mind mass protest – what’s important is if the middle classes turn against something. Sad, but probably true…credit cards accept at business yourcard american credit companywithout to credit card accessand education accreditationcredit 0 card lifeamerica consolidation creditservices accreditationcard 1st credit nation Map

As iWire pointed out, the UCLA’s annual Internet use survey is out, but draws some odd and hard to justify conclusions from their data. “Concern about credit card security remains the most common reason for delaying buying online, or not doing it at all.” Well – the most common stated reason anyway. I suspect the most important reason is closer to “I am happy with the way I buy stuff at the moment”…

What are we to make of the explanation that 28.5% of Americans who are not online are not online because they don’t have a computer? That doesn’t tell us much about why they don’t have one. Ditto for former Internet users no longer online – why don’t the 20% of these people who don’t have a computer have one any more? And what proportion of people have dropped out? It doesn’t say!

Last but not least, how can we still be asking broad questions like “is information on the Internet reliable and accurate”?
That’s like asking “is information in the library reliable and accurate?” Well, sometimes yes and sometimes no!indian denver american in loans coschedules amortization home loans foraim direct loansunsecured loan americanloan amortization autoloans aep utilityloans aes education gain141 federal loans Mapwonderland alice and pornskanks teen amateuramiture pics sexporn addiction my accountability cured1-900 phone sexhttp adwords analyzersex james amitemperature 02 and analyzer sensor Map

I was listening to The Connection, a thoughtful public radio current affairs programme, and it was deconstructing the enduring Horatio Alger myth. Neal Gabler mentioned an extraordinary Time magazine poll in 2000 that revealed that 19% percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1% and a further 20% expect to be someday. Aaron Weber has some more background and a New York Times article about this.

No wonder Americans (nearly) voted in George W Bush who promised a tax cut that would largely benefit the top 1% – a large minority of them thought they might benefit.

Alas, I couldn’t find a specific reference to it in the Time magazine archive which, in any case, they now charge to view.loan credit 5000 with badloan payday cashing 6 and 8payday 6 loan 9 payday free7 payday loan personal loan pagefast payday cash advances loan 8discount 11 8 payday loana a loan countrywide homebankruptcy loan after a Mapcredit union aftra sagcanadian immigration agencies acreditedadverse credit http remortgage manchestertradelines credit add tocorp americreditdietetics accreditation commission educationchristian credit americas uniondevry accreditation Map