This interesting question was posed by Bryan Chaplin of EconLog at a recent conference on Social Philosophy and Policy:

Profs and grad students alike largely seemed to accept the following list of topics where members of their occupation actually have expertise:

• Accurately describing the views of other philosophers, living and dead.
• Checking arguments for logical validity/internal consistency.

Its worth a quick read.

Last week, the Queen was there to reopen the “Cathedral for Railways”, St. Pancras. Today, the Eurostar will arrive in its new British home. It is a landmark occasion: the restoration of St Pancras, a Victorian monument to Great British Engineering, meets the high speed Eurostar - the train that connects London with Paris. It is also the completion of 9 year £5.8 billion channel tunnel project, and Britain has now joined the High Speed Rail club.

This high speed connection links the UK with Europe. Calais is less than an hour away, making it faster to get to than Brighton. Paris is barely 2:15 away, closer than Manchester. This fast link to Paris and the ongoing TGV fast rail network, means most of Europe is now a few hours by train away.

On Halloween Apple Macs owners got a taste of what these Windows people have been talking about for years, as internet criminals released the first trojan for Macs:

The Trojan comes disguised as a video-decoding plug-in that users are told they must install to watch free porn clips. Instead, the software burrows into the operating system and diverts some of the victim’s future web surfing to sites under the attacker’s control. It’s the professional attack on Macs that the security community has long predicted, according to Dave Marcus, security research manager at McAfee’s Avert Lab, who said it was “written by people who know how to write malware.”

In some ways Mac users should be proud, the iGospel has spread so far that there are enough Macs out there for malware crooks to take the time to write their vicious code. As Wired reports: “The arrival of the Mac Trojan signals that cybercrooks have decided there are finally enough Apple systems on the internet to make attacking them profitable, according to security experts.”

All is not lost iFriends, the Trojan does not exploit gaps in the software as Windows trojans do, OSX’s Unix base prevents this from happening. No, the only way you will find this nasty little code in your system is if you’ve been silly in the Internet’s red light district, and accepted an invitation to install a codec. You should know better.

Interesting article here about how the iPhone, a little bigger than a pack of cards, can replace an entire backpack of the necessities of the tourist.

I’m not sure I believe it, but … it’s here: iPhone: Madrid through the mini screen

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is seeking to capture the public’s imagination with a search for a national motto. Is this a good idea?

One would think not. For a number of reasons.

• A national motto would only appeal to a super-serious few;

• It is justly open to ridicule by the vast majority;

• An entity will never appear the same way to all, so why try;

• It is a vanity exercise;

• It would be a salve on national wounds, or be perceived to be;

• In its attempt at inclusiveness, it could never recognize diversity;

• It will ultimately be bland;

• It will only appeal to the patriots, thereby missing those it seeks to attract.

On the other hand, if it works it might inspire youth and that would be a terrific pay-off.

The atrticle is here:  Britain in five words

Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, the newly named vice-chief of staff, could be Pakistan’s next strongman. He’s Washington’s Plan B. If Musharraf does finally resign his command, Kiyani will control the military. Musharraf, who has near zero popular support, will be left without a power base — or even army protection.

More notes from Eric Margolis’ Who Will Be The First To Blink?Pakistan Teeters On The Edge While Bhutto, Musharraf Plot Out Next Moves

This week, the self-appointed apostle of democracy, George W. Bush, underlined his continued support for his ally, Musharraf. Bush called on Mush to doff his uniform and hold elections. Musharraf dutifully agreed to do so early next year and to hold elections.

But Musharraf has won every previous elections by blatant vote-rigging and bribery — we can expect more of the same.

He would lose any fair vote by a landslide.

Bush made no mention of Musharraf’s disgraceful firing of Supreme Court justices who were about to declare Mush’s ongoing rule violated the constitution. Nor has Bush or the U.S. Congress issued any demands that the exiled former PM Nawaz Sharif, leader of Pakistan’s other major political party, the Muslim League, be allowed to return to contest elections. So much for supporting democracy.

In Washington’s wrongheaded view, it’s either Mush or the mullahs. Or if Mush falters, then it’s Bhutto or Gen. Kiyani.

As of this writing, Bhutto still has not decided whether to collaborate with Musharraf or try to force a bloody confrontation with him.

Kiyani remains a cipher.

Anyone who still wonders why so many in the Muslim world hate the West needs look no further than Pakistan, where, in the name of “democracy” and “counter-terrorism,” Washington and London are stirring a witches brew of dictatorship, intrigue and violence.

In another case of ‘If it’s good for stockholders, it’s good for the company,’ a US Health insurer tied bonuses to dropping sick policyholders.

One of the state’s largest health insurers, reports the LA Times, set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.

Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed Thursday showed.

The revelation that the health plan had cancellation goals and bonuses comes amid a storm of controversy over the industry-wide but long-hidden practice of rescinding coverage after expensive medical treatments have been authorized.

These cancellations have been the recent focus of intense scrutiny by lawmakers, state regulators and consumer advocates. Although these “rescissions” are only a small portion of the companies’ overall business, they typically leave sick patients with crushing medical bills and no way to obtain needed treatment.

Most of the state’s major insurers have cancellation departments or individuals assigned to review coverage applications. They typically pull a policyholder’s records after major medical claims are made to ensure that the client qualified for coverage at the outset.

The documents show that in 2002, the company’s goal for Barbara Fowler, Health Net’s senior analyst in charge of rescission reviews, was 15 cancellations a month. She exceeded that, rescinding 275 policies that year — a monthly average of 22.9.

More recently, her goals were expressed in financial terms. Her supervisor described 2003 as a “banner year” for Fowler because the company avoided about “$6 million in unnecessary health care expenses” through her rescission of 301 policies — one more than her performance goal.

In 2005, her goal was to save Health Net at least $6.5 million. Through nearly 300 rescissions, Fowler ended up saving an estimated $7 million, prompting her supervisor to write: “Barbara’s successful execution of her job responsibilities have been vital to the profitability” of individual and family policies.

State law forbids insurance companies from tying any compensation for claims reviewers to their claims decisions.

To stay in shape now has a new meaning.

Feeling a little less mentally quick than you did a few years ago? Maybe you are among the many people who do “brain exercises” like sudoku to slow the cognitive decline associated with aging. We’ve got a better suggestion, say Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang in this NY Times op-ed Exercise on the Brain:

In humans, exercise improves what scientists call “executive function,” the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that’s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party.

Executive function starts to decline when people reach their 70s. But elderly people who have been athletic all their lives have much better executive function than sedentary people of the same age. This relationship might occur because people who are healthier tend to be more active, but that’s not the whole story. When inactive people get more exercise, even starting in their 70s, their executive function improves, as shown in a recent meta-analysis of 18 studies. One effective training program involves just 30 to 60 minutes of fast walking several times a week.

Exercise is also strongly associated with a reduced risk of dementia late in life. People who exercise regularly in middle age are one-third as likely to get Alzheimer’s disease in their 70s as those who did not exercise. Even people who begin exercising in their 60s have their risk reduced by half.

Wired gets the unusual opportunity to test the fervor of the internet’s two most mobilized camps. The political supporters or Mac Users. Hint: Ron Paul in Leopardskin?

Apple Fanatics	Ron Paul Enthusiasts
Kim Zetter writes an accurate article on what experts say is the poor security architecture of the iPhone’s operating system	Sarah Lai Stirland writes an accurate article on a recent flurry of deceptive spam promoting Ron Paul’s candidacy
Convinced that iPhone security is a-okay, blogger Daniel Eran Dilger falsely accuses Kim of basing the entire article on a single source. (Three sources are named in the Wired story.)	Someone creates a “Sarah Lai Stirland” account on a decoy Rudy Giuliani forum, and posts a message suggesting Sarah had been paid off by Giuliani fans to write a “fake” story
Sleaze Factor: 2.0	Sleaze Factor: 7.0
Quotes
“I dare you to have Zetter rewrite the article after interviewing more than one source. Perhaps this would result in an informed, balanced piece rather than a simple regurgitation of the message one individual fed her as a story.”	“The fake Ron Paul article we talked about on aim has been published. Hopefully, it will help accomplish your goals… Please send my payment via PayPal.”
Effort: 6.0 (2,300 word piece)	Effort: 3.0 (A few sentences)
Fallout
MacDailyNews re-reports Dilger’s claim as fact, then declines to correct the false story. Apple fans on the site’s message board pummel Kim with misogynist remarks	A Paulite makes a two-and-a-half minute video based on the fake posting. The video is widely promoted on message boards and blogs, and logs 16,000 hits on YouTube in less than a week.
Reach: 4.0 (Google News)	Reach: 8.0 (Blogs. Reddit, but no Digg)
“Women should stay out of tech, period, and be given an abacus to play with. — MacDailyNews reader who’s never tried to use an abacus	“So Wired has been exposed as lying about non-existent Ron Paul-supporting spammers. Even if they weren’t lying … (Paul’s fundraising) is what drives lying little statist creeps like Wired editorialists to spew their online lies.” – Lew Rockwell.com
Zeal: 2.0 (Some dissent. No hate mail)	Zeal: 9.0 (Little dissent. Lots of hate mail)
Total: 14.0	Total: 27.0

Last night I attended a talk at Chatham House where His Excellency Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, faced-off with Professor Robert Watson of the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I, like everyone in the room, walked in with a pretty fixed set of ideas, none of which have changed spectacularly. Which is the problem with such debates; His Excellency is quite correct when he says that Environmentalism is an ideology, but he gets it wrong in the discussion of where that ideology is placed in the risk analysis of climate change.

Klaus’ argument is constructed on six points:

1. The increase in global temperature is very small to negligible.
2. The IPCC data on climate change is highly speculative. Real data is not at all alarming.
3. There is no consensus on whether Climate Change is man-made or natural.
4. When the issue is viewed in economic terms, the cost benefit analysis is not worth the action.
5. De-industrialization would be a bad idea, as industrialization is historically connected to freedom and the free market. Government intervention could be catastrophic: government failure is always more dangerous than market failure.
6. Climate change issues are a luxury that we in the wealthy global north can afford, but in the global south the world’s poor must be allowed to industrialize as we in the north did, with all its necessary pollutants.

The answer to it all is that people should just “take it easy” and not get excited about this silly idea of climate change.

Vaclav Klaus claimed Environmentalism had become a pseudo-religious ideology, and must be taken for that. This ideology has elements of that of the communism that he and his country struggled against for decades. Klaus’ main point was that environmentalism is a threat to democracy and freedom, and should be fought like threats to democracy and freedom.

None of these are particularly new points, but the case made was interesting. The comparison between Soviet communism and environmentalism is a severe challenge. A challenge that I disagree with.

His first three points about the actual data were comprehensibly refuted by Professor Watson. IPCC and the scientific community have as much a consensus as is needed in any other institution would need to bring about change. The moderator of the event, the BBCs Environmental Analyst Roger Harrabin, quoted a recent poll of scientists where only 18% say the IPCC data is overstated. That compared to 17% that claim the case is severely understated, let alone the 68% who agreed with the data. However, for the sake of discussion, I’ll accept that the data is still in contest.

His forth point was that when viewed in economic terms climate change does not stand up to cost-benefit analysis. The Stern Report last year was pretty conclusive on the subject: pay now and save a lot of money later. The Stern Report is in dispute, and those who dispute it in the UK say that the numbers are too soft. However, that aside, what I don’t understand is what is the problem with developing low carbon technology? The cost-benefit analysis of walking on the moon was plain stupid, but that happened and we’re pretty pleased about it. The cost-benefit analysis of the Iraq war is disgraceful, and yet…

In economic terms, expanding the energy market beyond Exxon to include new technologies that reduce waste and process materials more efficiently is, I think, a pretty good idea. Even without Climate Change. Weening ourselves off non-renewable cheap energy supplies means when those cheap materials become more expensive or politically challenging to acquire, our economy doesn’t suffer.

Klaus’ fifth point: Industrialization has been historically linked to the use of cheap fossil fuels. Industrialization has also lead to the expansion of the middle class and of our contemporary understanding of social freedom. Such can also be said of the Steam Engine and the French Revolution. I don’t think we need less industrialized nations to mimic our footsteps directly. Industrialization has been linked to fossil fuels because it first occurred in nations where there was an abundance of coal. Now it is happening in a place where there is often an abundant source of other energy: sunlight.

Furthermore, nobody is saying de-industrialize. The environmentalism movement, like any, has many forms, but most simply want our environment to factor into investment and development in technology. There is no turning back the clock on technology. We aren’t going back to a world of horse power and ox drawn ploughs. Expand the energy market to take advantage of solar, wind and tide/wave power. Make cars more efficient. Use as much energy from non-renewables as you can. Don’t just belch it into the air.

What is the problem with this? The anecdote is of the circuit-board maker who, in the face of the global ban of CFCs (because of that conveniently oft forgotten man made hole in the Ozone Layer) said they could not properly clean their circuit-boards in the production process without the use of CFCs. Why are your circuit-boards dirty in the first place? Now, having adapted to the ban, their costs have minimalized and their production technique has become more efficient, and more profitable. This is free market solutions, not communism.

The last point is bizarre, but still often used. The North/South Divide, and the luxury of being environmentally friendly. This is plain silly. What would I rather send to the equatorial region of Africa: a 40′ tank of petrol or a 40′ container full of solar panels? Hmmm. One is a long term solution that allows the obvious energy source to be converted locally and instantly consumed, and with good maintanence will not run out. The other develops a dependency on: oil (at $96/barrel) production, transportation, refinement, transportation of the refined product and the consumption and maintanence of the process in between and it runs out. An electric motor has a fraction of the working parts of a combustion motor.

The most important point is not refuting the reasons for why Mr. Klaus things Environmentalism is the new Communism. It is that Environmentalism is not the new Communism. Klaus infers that Environmentalism is government driven and therefor a step toward authoritarianism. On this, I wholeheartedly disagree. Governments have been incredibly slow at taking this issue up. This is a movement that has been developed by citizens.

He has it completely backward, it is a completely democratic movement where people have stood up and made the government and the business elite take notice: this isn’t good enough. People the world over are recycling, they are doing their part to better their world. It is not about the state, carpooling is not a nod to a flag. It is a realization that we are a part of something, and it is precious. It is democratic, it is the one place where citizens feel any sort of belonging.

President Klaus is not a stupid man, so I have to wonder why he takes such an extreme position on the climate change movement. My first reaction is that he is an opportunist capitalizing on the quick publicity that controversy brings. Perhaps he is just not that clued-up on what people think about this subject.

Vaclav Klaus was pretty near laughed out of the room. Not on purpose, judging by the confusion (indeed, my own confusion too) most everyone in the crowd was interested in what the esteemed president had to say and got this recycled bullshit. If he had an interesting or worth point to contribute, then most were intrigued to hear it. In the ensuing question an answer period, his framework did not, could not, keep itself coherent. Climate change skeptics were the first to rush to ask questions in support of the President. But as the room heard more dubious debate, they turned. What is wrong with a universal feeling among the people that: “something must be done” to slow climate change.

And more importantly, as one questioner asked: “how can we hold you accountable for your political decisions in twenty years if what you say is incorrect?” His Excellency the President of the Czech Republic answered this question by saying that the IPCC is full of crap. Thats not good enough for me.

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years.

No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

Knowing when to come in out of the rain; why the early bird gets the worm; life isn’t always fair; and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge.)

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6 -year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer Tylenol, sun lotion or a Band-Aid to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the Ten Commandments became contraband; churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims.

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust; his wife, Discretion; his daughter, Responsibility; and his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 3 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I’m A Victim.

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.

Underarms, a part of the body most of us have never given a moment’s thought to. Wrong. People are rolling stuff into it in increasing numbers and with increasing thickness, some guys are even ‘trimming.’

Here’s an interesting NY Times article Cast Aside Underarm Protection, if You Dare that basically makes the point (the way I read it) that it’s OK to continuing ignoring your pits; its OK not to buy in to $2.3 billion pit deodorant industry in the US.