nashoi

That report doesn't quote the 20% figure. A somewhat more rational report can be found here http://www.securitynewsdesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/CCTV-Image-42-How-many-cameras-are-there-in-the-UK.pdf

"Britain has over 20% of the world's CCTV cameras." Where does this figure come from?

http://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/forum/read.php?20,967794,page=1

LadyD, Pinker doesn't claim this is the only reason for the decline, far from it, but it is an undeniable factor. Mass incarceration has a couple of obvious draw backs. Firstly once the most violent individuals are locked up imprisoning more reaches a point of diminishing returns as each new prisoner is less and less dangerous. Secondly, people tend to get less violent as they get older, keeping them locked up beyond a certain point won't achieve much. There is then an optimum level of incarceration which is difficult to achieve when a politician who suggests reducing prison numbers is accused of being soft on crime. The argument can be won however and I think it probably has in this country when even Tory justice ministers (well Ken Clarke anyway) say numbers are too high. Oh and yes, the argument is that all forms of violence are in decline, including slips in the shower.

Here are few actual quotes from Pinker's book. "Plotting the homicide rates of five major european countries over the last century we see the historical trajectory we have been tracking: a long-term decline that lasted until the 1960s, an uptick that began in that tumultuous decade, and the recent return to more peaceable rates. Every major western european country showed a decline, and though it looked for a while as if England and Ireland would be exceptions, in the 2000s their rates dropped as well." So England's homicide rate did double and has not quite returned to 1950s levels yet. When he goes on to discuss how this has happened the very first point he makes is the following (talking about the US): "... the country beefed up the criminal justice sysyem in several ways. The most effective was also the crudest: putting more men behibd bars for longer periods of time. The rate of imprisonment in the US was pretty much flat from the 1920s to the 1960s, and it even declined a bit in the early 70s. But then it shot up almost fivefold, and today more than two million americans are in jail, the highest incarceration rate on the planet." "Unlike the more gimmicky theories of the crime decline, massive imprisonment is almost certain to lower crime rates because the mechanism by which it operates has so few moving parts. Imprisonment physically removes the most crime prone individuals from the streets...Incarceration is especially effective when a small number of individuals commit a large number of crimes." "Incarceration can also reduce violence by the familiar but less direct route of deterrence...But proving that incarceration deters people (as opposed to incapacitating them) is easier said than done, because the statistics are inherently stacked against it...But with suitable ingenuity the deterrence effect can be tested. Analyses by Levitt and other statisticians of crime suggest that deterrence works." "But the case that the incarceration boom led to the crime decline is far from watertight. For one thing the prison bulge began in the 1980s, but violence did not decline until a decade later. For another Canada did not go an imprisonment binge, but its violence rate went down too. These facts don't disprove the theory that imprisonment mattered,but they force it to make additional assumptions, such as that the effect of imprisonment builds up over time, reaches a critical mass, and spills over national borders."

WorkingMummy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I hadn't heard any of that. > > It kinds of makes my point. Vatican harbours child > rapists, the pope is pope. Vatican harbours > homosexuals, the pope has to go. I think this is a bit of an exaggeration, if a culmination of scandal prompted his resignation, it was the child abuse and subsequent cover-ups that have caused the most problems and this recent documentary points the finger directly at Ratzinger. http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2013/02/did-documentary-film-force-pope-resign

If you were planning a trip to Rome you might want to go sooner rather than later. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophecy_of_the_Popes#section_3

Mel Gibson has one saving grace. He's not Russell Crowe.

According to this list of inflation adjusted US box office grosses, the first three Star Wars films made the top 15 of all time. The Phantom Menace made a respectable 16th and then...oh dear. http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm

Talking of pointless cables read the customer reviews for this one, I think it might be what you're looking for. http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-2m-Braided-Cable/dp/B003CT2A2M/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

"we would either need to get by with less, or find more land" Would we though? Consider the above mentioned report on waste, in the developing world most waste is before the point of sale and is down to poor roads/refrigeration etc, in the developed world it's post sale. Both can cut by changes in the market, a natural consequence of economic development in countries like India or price changes here. Secondly the difference in yield is slight depending on what you grow and where. A small drop in yield would easily be countered by reduced waste. As usually seems to be the case, a combination of approaches is likely to be necessary, a bit of Tom and Barbara and a bit of Thanet Earth. I really don't see a long term problem though. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger_b_1463429.html http://www.thanetearth.com/ http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7397/full/nature11069.html http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press.release/item/choosing-organic-milk-could-offset-detrimental-effects-of-climate-change#.UO9SKUfJd3U

Gingerbeer are you confusing your Tuilagis? This is not the one who plays for England but his older brother who has played club rugby in Italy and plays for Samoa at the international level, I see no reason why anyone would be disappointed in him playing in Japan.

11,000 deaths annually in a population of 311,000,000 equates to a 0.00004% chance of being fatally wounded. How much political capital is Obama likely to burn through in order to reduce that? Consider your child's school contacting you to inform you that they were planning a new activity (some type of outdoor pursuit for example) and they need your consent. They tell they cannot guarantee 100% safety but they can guarantee 99.99996% safety. Would you be happy with that? If other parents campaigned against it would you view them as acting rationally?

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky came up with Prospect Theoery in the late seventies, loss aversion was a key part of this. It replaced the utility theory of money as a way of modelling our decision making and won Kahneman the Noble Prize for Economics in 2002. So sorely tempted though I am to claim it was all my idea, I'm afraid not. I came across the ideas reading Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow which I can't recommend highly enough.

"Their actions led, in part, to the suicide of somebody else." How do you know this?

Humans are loss averse, meaning the emotional intensity of a loss is greater than that of a commensurate gain. This has a huge impact on society/economics, for example it can explain some of the irrational consumption decisions we make and help explain the difference between the consumption decisions of the rich and poor. Any politician from local to national trying to effect change, or reform an institution can expect those who perceive a potential loss to shout the loudest. Both sides in a dispute will value the concessions they have made as greater than those of their opponents, as their opponents concessions are their gains. This can look bizarre to the outside world who are not looking at the situation with the same bias. The list of situations it impacts is a lengthy one. Loss aversion is then, apart from anything else, a conservative force on society. Those who are more loss averse will be more socially conservative as the potential downsides will loom larger. They will fail to see the same value in what they get in return for the pain of taxation or regulation and none of this has anything to do with morality.

Back on the subject of selling animals this still makes me laugh http://www.parrotsmuggler.com/2010/07/koala-for-sale.html Don't mess with GumNut

Surely the obvious solution is to return to the idea of having somebody walking in front of the vehicle waving a flag, this would simultaneously lower unemployment, solve the obesity crisis and reduce the number and severity of accidents. The kind of joined up thinking we need to mend broken Britain.

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He was talking about our ability to construct a convincing narrative from a limited amount of information, in fact the more limited the information the easier it is. So no not stupid, more delusional.

Coincidentally just read the following line in a book " Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance." and that was written by a Nobel prize winner

Alec, If you haven't come across the book Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Du Flo then I strongly recommend it. Below is a link to the relevant section of the website. They talk about why people make what on the face of it seem to be irrational decisions in even more extreme circumstances than the above. http://pooreconomics.com/chapters/2-billion-hungry-people

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring#section_5

Entwistle was director of BBC Vision at the time the Saville investigation was pulled so things haven't been looking good for him for a while.