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

Here’s a story that makes my teeth grind with frustration – leaked order logs from a spammer selling $50 bottles of penis enlargement pills show around 6,000 people responded to the messages over one month alone. This Wired article goes into detail – some of it eventually tedious but usually grimly fascinating – about the kind of people who do make these purchases. Somehow they even managed to get one of these morons to talk about why – “there was a picture on the top of the page that said, ‘As Seen on TV,’ and I guess that made me think it was legit,” said a San Diego salesman”.

I do worry a bit about the breach of privacy involved in producing the article at all, however…movies japanese lesbianmovie lactatingmovies lesbian pornomovie lesbiansmovie sex lolitamovie adult matrix maturevs movies mature youngmet art moviesmmf movies fuckingmovies mommy

I forgot about this – It’s here (if you don’t want to use the “Google Alert”:http://www.googlealert.com/ service I already mentioned).

Thanks to azeem for the link

I have always preferred cold weather to hot – and yesterday London suffered its hottest day in recorded history – 35.3 degrees C (96 F). There may be Americans out there who scoff at such weather but in countries like the UK homes don’t have air conditioning and office air conditioners often don’t work (because they are rarely needed!)

Fortunately it’s a little better today but the latest is that the temperature may go back up on the weekend. This is the last thing I need now that I am trying to put together the first draft of my dissertation – I can hardly think! The rest of Europe is suffering, too…

There are several sites available to let you compare your favourite nations to one another online. Each has its merits and specialties so if you don’t find what you want from one, try one of the others.

NationMaster – the one I found out about most recently – lets you look at statistics in hundreds of different categories. Earlier I found the similar Your Nation.com – which relies on rather old CIA Fact Book data (1998) – and the UN’s “Infonation” aimed particularly at schoolkids which has a somewhat eccentric navigation system and a shorter list of countries to compare. It’s a pity someone doesn’t make a comparative database like these but which is dynamically linked to the latest sources of information – these while interesting will become increasingly out of date.

If you want to dig deeper Offstats provides a database of links to official statistics from several countries across the Internet, but without the whizzy direct comparison engine.

One key measure missing is the UN’s ever-popular quality of life (“Human Development”) index (report / index in PDF form). Of course how you score a country depends on what you value – one could come up with a different ranking with different criteria – but it’s always interesting to see how different countries fare. Canada long valued its top position through much of the 1990s (it dropped to 8th this year – behind the US(!)) and I notice the EU is blowing its own trumpet with six of the top ten countries.

The State Department’s assessment of the cost of living in many world cities is also entertaining, though it seems to find most places more expensive to live in than Washington DC which suggests to me that the “basket” of goods and services they use to generate the index is a little skewed.

Thanks to Eszter for the NationMaster linkringtone amber pacificcode nokia ringtone 3390650 free midi ringtone treoctu tv 24 show ringtoneringtone composer free nokia 3310ringtone blackberry 7290free 8390 download nokia ringtonedownload ringtone mosquito alarm Mapringtone nokia 33608700c ringtonephone ringtones alcatel cellfree absolutely ringtone sprintfor mp3 verizon agency ringtonesringtones alltel funnyringtone palm treo 6007600 nokia ringtones Map

If you are a journalist you have almost certainly seen this cryptic text: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. In dapibus magna et velit…” etc.
lipsum.com collects in one place information about the origins of this text – used in place of actual copy when pages are being laid out – and provides a way to automatically generate as much of the dummy text as you need.

I just got around to seeing ”
Catch Me If You Can” – the somewhat Hollywood-ised but still fascinating story of Frank Abagnale, who stole $2m over five years starting at age 16 and impersonated a doctor, a lawyer and a pilot among other professions. I reviewed it for Epinions (I have earned $24 so far from them and need to earn another $76 before they cut me a cheque so go take a look!)

Frank – who now runs a successful anti-fraud business – gives his impressions of the movie on his own site. He was also interviewed at length in Australia well before the movie’s release and tells a number of the movie’s best stories there.

Here’s a tip of his you won’t get from the movie: “if I’m going to mail a letter and I don’t have a stamp, you know, I can take that letter and address the person’s name in the left-hand corner I’m sending it to, and put my name in the middle of the envelope and the mail will return back to that person, and I’ve sent it without a stamp”number card credit american expressgift card certificate credit $100accreditation united in the statesmedical record requirements accreditationdiploma school high home at accreditedschools online high accreditedaccredited acr facilitiesassurance and quality accreditation Map

When someone quotes you a figure for the number of weblogs there are around, you should mentally be subtracting at least a third to account for weblogs that are no longer active – at least according to figures from the NITLE blog census discussed once again by blogcount. I would expect this proportion to rise somewhat over time – at the moment I imagine the weblog phenomenon is still growing fast enough that a large number of users are new ones. If they become disenchanted and the rate of new entries begins to fall the proportion of “live” weblogs to dead ones may fall.
Thanks to Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka weblog for the link