We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Robert Matthews, a regular writer for QED column in the Sunday Telegraph, looks at the “wonders of technology” David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, decided it was time we should all benefit from.
Mr Blunkett appears to have fallen under the spell of biometric methods, which use characteristics ranging from fingerprints to handwriting to verify the identity of people. He seems to favour a particularly sophisticated version of the technology, which uses the unique iris patterns of the eye to check ID.
…there is still a stunning lack of awareness of a basic mathematical result that shows why we should all be very wary of any type of screening, biometric or otherwise.
In the case of screening – whether for breast cancer or membership of al-Qaeda – the [Bayes’s] theorem shows that the technology does not do what everyone from doctors to Home Secretaries seems to think it does.
To take a concrete example, suppose a biometric screening method is 99.9 per cent accurate: that is, it spots 99.9 per cent of imposters, and incorrectly accuses one in 1,000 bona fide people (in reality, these are very optimistic figures). Now suppose that every year a horde of 1,000 terrorists passes through Heathrow airport. What are the chances of the biometric system detecting any of them?
The obvious answer is 99.9 per cent. But, in fact, Bayes’s Theorem shows that the correct answer is about two per cent. That is, when the alarms go off and the armed response team turns up at passport control, it is 98 per cent likely to be a false alarm.
Why? Because not even the amazing accuracy of the biometric test can cope with the very low prior probability that any one of the 60 million passengers using Heathrow each year is a terrorist. Sure, it boosts the weight of evidence in favour of guilt 1,000-fold, but that is still not enough to overcome the initially very low probability of guilt.
So there you have it. You just need to calculate your probability of being one of the incorrectly accused one in 1,000 bona fide people and books your ticket accordingly.
1. skeptic, sceptic, doubter — (someone who habitually doubts accepted beliefs)
… so in reality we are not truly ‘eurosceptic’ as we do not ‘doubt’ the harmful nature of the EU, but rather we regard that as axiomatic. What is more, we have nothing against Europe per se, it is the regulatory statist political entity called the European Union we abominate. Hell, I used to work for the EU which probably explains why I dislike it so much: I know how it really works.
Scepticism seems to imply ‘doubt’. We have no doubt whatsoever.
Asks b3ta.com:
Men: Like looking at pretty ladies? Like laughing at bad translations of Russian mobile phone conferences? You’re in the land of luck as this site combines both.
It certainly does. Eldar Murtazin is impressed, and Andreas Von Horn (that’s what it says) translates:
Year by year, visiting CeBIT, catch myself at idea, that they have better organization, and exhibits for the first time are shown exactly at this exhibition, instead of wandering on the world, turning in an antiquity. But there is one big advantage of the Russian exhibitions and of SvyazExpocomm as one of the most appreciable, there are excessive plenty of beautiful girls on one square meter of the area. The last year one my foreign friend after visiting the exhibition has left in prostration and has told, that knows where to look for a wife. Girls in city centre which caused the genuine interest and remarks in the excellent form, have simply ceased to exist. The friend all the rest three days has spent at the exhibition, and according to him has not been sorry at all about it.
On results of the first day has collected about 500 photos of girls from various stands, a part from them we’ll publish in this picture story. I can not give up to myself such pleasure, and the reputation needs to be supported, in fact the tradition began the last year. To try listing all photos is senseless, further are photos that have appeared by will of case beside and have pleased me.
For knowing people and visiting the exhibition not the first year, CBOSS name talks a lot about, but I beg to assume, that in the last turn about billing. However, judge, I in my turn dream to shake hands with the person, which selects girls for this company!
Ah, those wacky foreigners.
 
It was strangely disconcerting to suddenly see our blog-father off the ether for such a long time, particularly as, like Glenn, Samizdata.net also resides on Hosting Matters servers.
For those of you who do not know, Hosting Matters had an electrical fire and whilst it took us off the air for only a few minutes, the James Brown of the Blogosphere was silenced for most of yesterday.
But he is back and blogging his heart out once more. The world is back running in well-oiled grooves.
Heh.
I am all in favour of the recent decision by shareholders of European drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline to vote down a proposed ‘golden parachute’ payout to its chief executive in the event that he ever got the boot.
The payment would have been $36 million, and while I yield to no-body in my admiration for the capitalist system, it seems perfectly fair if the owners of the firm – the shareholders – felt such a proposal was going too far. A case of property owners using their property as they say fit. Of course, by ‘too far’ we are entering the field of subjective judgement. It seems a bit odd that in an age where few bat an eyelid at the sums earned by Formula One racing drivers or footballers, so many get riled at such payouts to company bosses.
In any event, we are going to see more examples of big groups of shareholders like pension funds getting upset about this sort of pay regime. One thing slightly bugs me in that some of these pension funds are increasingly being seen by anti-globalistas and similar-minded folk as ways of inflicting their views on the world. The buzzword out there is ‘shareholder activism’. Let’s be clear here. It is our retirement money at stake. By all means let’s not vote in big pay rises for hopeless bosses, but tomorrow’s pensioners need the wealth generated by good firms of today – and often that means hiring the best people.
And that sort of thing comes at a price.
My excuse for writing about cricket is that writing about cricket means writing about Zimbabwe, which is one of the wretched-of-the-earth countries just now, lest we forget. But the truth is that I just love cricket, and that I have loved it ever since the days of Hutton, Compton, May, Cowdrey, Laker, Statham, Truman, Dexter … and those are just (some of) the English names.
So, what is the big story in cricket just now? Read Jennings, and the news is just that people have been, you know, playing cricket. Look at the cricket web sites and it’s just cricket as usual. Who’s in and who’s out. Who’s firing on all cylinders, and who has a cylinder injury and will be missing the next few games. Earlier in the week, the British cricket pages were full of how well the new England quick bowlers had done, and how badly the Zimbabweans had batted against them on that horribly one-sided Saturday when nineteen wickets fell and by the end Zimbabwe had lost by an innings in three days. (Girls and Americans: “by an innings” is very bad, and three days is not long at all.)
Yet above and beyond all these regular comings and goings, I believe that cricket posterity will have no hesitation in deciding that the current big cricket story happened just over a week ago, just before the England-Zimbabwe series got started, in the form of the newly announced ICC Test Championship table.
→ Continue reading: The significance of the new Test Match Cricket international ranking system
Everyone in Britain will have to pay around £25 for a compulsory identity card under proposals being put to the cabinet by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary.
The “smart” card will identify the holder using iris-recognition technology. Failure to carry the card will not be an offence but police will be able to order people to present it at a police station.
So, you won’t need to carry the card with you at all time. How is that going to help the ‘fightagainstterrorism’? Ah, the terrorists will just report to a police station to show off their hi-tech faked ID cards…
The charge is aimed at overcoming resistance to the scheme from the Treasury. Until now Cabinet support for a national compulsory identity card has been outweighed by the Treasury, which has objected to footing the estimated £1.6 billion bill.
Notice how the main reason that ID cards have not been introduced is that the Treasury opposed the £1.6 billion bill. Concerns for privacy or individual rights? Blank stares around the Cabinet meeting table…
While forcing people to pay for the card could add to the anticipated objections from human rights campaigners, Mr Blunkett believes that concern about national security is sufficient to ensure that individuals will be prepared to bear the cost.
Damn, the one time Mr Blunkett uses the word individual is to charge him the cost of extending governments reach over the individual.
Senior figures in the Cabinet strongly support the plan for the card, which would use a microchip to hold details including age, place of birth, home address and a personal number to identify the holder. It is also hoped that the card could be used to entitle the holder to a range of state benefits, thereby cutting benefit fraud.
Mr Blunkett discussed his plan for a national ID card with Tom Ridge, the head of the US Department of Homeland Security, at a meeting in Washington earlier this month. Mr Blunkett agreed to develop a joint programme, using the same technology, with the US, which has already agreed a similar protocol with Canada.
US and Canada?! Anglosphere, help!
A report from AP about how Iraqis are trying to learn what it means to be free after more than thirty years of tyranny under Saddam. Apperently, more than 60 percent of Iraqis were born after Ba’athist party took power and it takes more than absence of Saddam and his henchmen to make sense of the alien concept of freedom.
“No one knows what freedom means. When were born, we opened our eyes to Saddam and everything was forbidden. Our life was all about fear.” Salima al-Majali, 29.
“Freedom means that Saddam is no longer around.” Firas al-Dujaili, a 28-year-old doctor.
“The word freedom is a strange word to us because we don’t believe in it,” Ali al-Daham, 25.
“There is nothing called freedom in Iraq. There’s only terror, prison.” Jasim al-Dujaili, 27 who spent four years of his childhood in jail as part of a collective punishment of his rebellious village.
“I couldn’t teach the students the truth, I was unable to tell them that we were ruled by a dictator. If I did, my neck would be on the line.” Wijda Khalidi, 37, a high school teacher.
“All we have known is war, war and war. Everything was forbidden.” 30-year-old Suad al-Daham, a Shiite Muslim.
“Freedom means to travel, to get the job I want, to study in the college I want.” Ahmed al-Samarai, 28.
The European Central Bank (ECB) is in talks with Hitachi Ltd. about embedding radio tags in euro bank notes to prevent counterfeiting of euros.
The ECB is deeply concerned about counterfeiting and money laundering and is said to be looking at radio tag technology. Last year, Greek authorities were confronted with of 2,411 counterfeiting cases and seized 4,776 counterfeit bank notes while authorities in Poland nabbed a gang suspected of making and putting over a million fake euros into circulation.
To add to the problem, businesses also find it hard to judge a note’s authenticity as current equipment cannot tell between bogus currency and old notes with worn-out security marks. Among the security features in current euros are threads visible under ultraviolet light.
According to Prianka Chopra, an analyst with market research firm Frost and Sullivan the main objective is to determine the authenticity of money and to
stop counterfeits.
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags also have the ability of recording information such as details of the transactions the paper note has been involved in. It would, therefore, also prevent money-laundering, make it possible to track illegal transactions and even prevent kidnappers demanding unmarked bills.
Besides acting as a digital watermark, the use of radio chips could speed up routine bank processes such as counting. With such tags, a stack of notes can be passed through a reader with the sum added in a split-second, similar to how inventory is tracked in an RFID-based system.
Hitachi is developing noncontact chips for use in bank notes and other paper documents, Kantaro Tanii, confirmed the company’s corporate communications manager for Europe. Hitachi’s Web site describes a 0.4-mm by 0.4-mm by 60-micron radio frequency identification chip, called the Mu Chip, that works in the 2.45-GHz frequency band and has a 128-bit ROM for storing its identity number. It was originally conceived as a bank-note-tracking device but could also be used in passports, driver’s licenses and other official documents.
[SCENE 26. Int. LUCY’s bedroom. Night.]
Open on shot of bedroom wall opposite the bed. There is a large mirror hanging on the wall. In the mirror we can see the reflection of LUCY and JOHN making wild, passionate love in the bed. Camera turns down and pans across bedroom floor, past assorted clothes discarded hastily in the fenzy of mutual lust. LUCY’s cries of climax drown out JOHN’s heaving grunts. Camera closes in on bed as JOHN rolls over. Both are glistening with sweat and breathless.
LUCY: That… that was… fantastic!
JOHN: Yeah… great. You were great.
LUCY: Do you know what I want now?
JOHN: What?
LUCY opens the top drawer of her bedside table and produces two large carrots.
LUCY: Want one?
JOHN: Oh, you bet.
LUCY hands one carrot to JOHN who begins to munch it manfully. LUCY nibbles her carrot, savouring the little bites.
LUCY: Mmmmm… I just have to have a carrot after sex.
JOHN: Yeah. Nothing beats a post-coital munch.
LUCY: So, am I going to see you again?
JOHN: Well, now that Sheila and I have split up… I reckon so.
LUCY: Why did you two split up anyway?
JOHN stops eating his carrot and looks away, trying to hide his shame.
JOHN: She… she was a celery-freak!!!
[END]
There are many pleasurable benefits in writing for a blog such as this, not least of is revelling in the quality of our readership. This being the case, I can think of no finer endorsement of our efforts than that we attract thinkers and writers of the calibre of Andy Duncan, a regular reader who has produced an analysis of the strategy behind the EU project that I cannot possibly leave languishing at the bottom of a heap of comments where it currently resides.
Andy’s hypothesis is so startlingly good, not just because of the thought that has gone into it but also because he admits to having once been a ‘creature of the night’. We can therefore safely assume that he knows whereof he speaks. So let him speak:
I’m unsure as to your political orientation, but if you were a follower of Karl Marx’s fallback idea of creating a social democratic Utopia, via the ballot box rather than via the bullet in the back of the neck, how would you do it? Putting my devout Marxist hat on, (and I was such an idiot, until well after my 30th year), this is how I would do it:
Marxist Hat ON
- I would base myself in my philosophical homeland of Germany and France, the roaming ground of Hegel, Marx, Napoleon, Kant, Sartre, and other assorted violent destroyers and idiots.
- I would pretend to be democratic, having seen honest revolutionaries fail in Russia and elsewhere.
- I would slowly subvert democracy, steal or distort the language of liberty to throw off my accusers and enemies, and gradually form an unspoken aristocracy of fellow travellers. What better than to call this a “liberal” elite, to really turn white into black, and make two plus two equal five? 🙂
- I would gradually raise taxes, intervene, cause capitalist failure through regulation, thereby allowing myself the excuse to interfere even further, raise even more taxes, etc, etc, until at least half of the economy was in my hands (though 40% will do nicely).
→ Continue reading: Duncan’s Laws
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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