The BBC is currently funded by the country's only hypothecated poll tax - a flat fee levied per head of population, irrespective of ability to pay, to meet a specific government spending objective. Rumours abound again today that the music industry is pushing for similarly special dispensation (though Charles at the Guardian thinks not). Both our current and our last Prime Minister agree that hypothecation is a bad idea (I don't think either has ever though it necessary to come out explicitly against poll taxes). So why this single exception for media? Very strange.

If I understand it aright, the point of DRM is to prevent theft (or if you're being pedantic copyright violation of intellectual property). Currently Tesco has £16 of my money and has given me nothing in return. It is pretty clear to me where the theft lies in this relationship.

It is of course not an original observation that ten sodding years ago Napster was much, much better than this. That I'd happily even pay Actual Money for access to something that good, convenient and DRM-free today. But I would. And in the meantime, I'll go back to the marginally less laborious work-around of buying and ripping CDs.

Oh, and the music? A couple of Bob Marley albums. Don't worry about a thing indeed.

"why are the studies of Professor Aldridge and her ilk so successful, despite their obvious effects? One: they result in a tremendous level of crime, which generates a tremendous level of funding for "criminologists." Two: they are counterintuitive, ie, obviously wrong. No one would pay a "social scientist" to admit the obvious. Three: as per Noah Webster, they appeal to the ruling class simply because they are so abhorrent to the ruled class...And four: they are not disprovable, because if pure, undiluted Quaker love ever becomes the only way for British civilization to deal with its ferals, they won't leave much of Professor Aldridge."

It is perhaps the most obvious over-used trick in the arsenal of the social scientist to take a well-known phenomenon and claim that it doesn't really exist. I know because I remember from my days as a history student the joy "revisionist" historians evidently experienced claiming there was no such thing as the Industrial Revolution, the Blitz or the British Empire - normally justified by taking a highly reductionist popular definition of the phenomenon in question and then demonstrating, trivially enough, that the real events were far more complex and nuanced than this. Indeed I recall coming across a book published at about the time of the first Gulf War - a war that was manifestly, indisputably going on under the noses of the world media and therefore anyone who troubled to glance at a television or newspaper - claiming that there was no such thing as the Gulf War. (This is a quite separate and more interesting thing than mere conspiracy theory, the sort of idiotic notion that the moon landings were faked.)

(1) I recommend anyone who goes read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy first - much of the country's outlandish beauty comes from looking like the early stages of a terraforming project and I found it entertaining to compare the various landscapes to variously the Red, Green or Blue stages of KSR's imagined Mars. (A lot of places had elements of more than one, of course.) I'm not sure where the oft-repeated "surface of the moon" idea comes from, very little of it seemed to look like the moon to me.

(2) most of the big problems of the rest of the developed world seem to be passing Iceland by. It has abundant free energy from geothermal sources; little of the country is low-lying (and the sandur, while beautiful, is essentially uninhabitable); global warming is probably a net gain in a climate that treated me to freezing rain more often than not in July; there is sign neither of the fundamental demographic collapse that faces the aging populations of eg Japan, Italy or Spain nor the problems of integrating foreign populations that arise elsewhere from the only probable solution to that phenomenon. All that said, Iceland seems to have its own unique problems - highly active volcanoes and a need to import many essentials being only the most obvious.

(3) I ate more new animals in my first 48 hours in Reykjavik than I think I have in the past two years - two species of char (one Arctic, one an Icelandic word I regret not recording at the time); guillemot; puffin; and whale. On top of that variations on old themes - smoked lamb was new to me, as was the way they do salted cod.

Extraordinarily beautiful country. Also a good hedge proposition for serious survivalists or - with a population of only 300,000 and half of them in the capital - the determinedly misanthropic. If no solution is found to oil running out Iceland is probably an even better bet than Canada.

That's how well email marketing works.

Their new patent for Network Node Ad Targeting aims to "find the influencers in a social network and place ads on their pages/profiles/sites". All very interesting, except that the Influencers paradigm has been pretty thoroughly debunked: primarily by the work of Duncan Watts at MIT, but also more recently by (an admittedly anthropocentric interpretation of) Andrea Cavagna's work on flocking patterns. Yet more research from Pollara paints a similar picture. As Steve Rubel commented when the Pollara research came out:

"This new batch of data largely backs up what my employer's Edelman Trust Barometer found earlier this year. Some 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust "a person like me.""

These Influentials simply don't exist. Targeting ads to them won't help. It is becoming increasingly obvious that even as marketers begin to understand that their traditional shortcuts to influence - mass and reach - are evaporating in the new world, every new shortcut they can come up with evaporates as soon as they devise it too.

(HT Martin Stabe)