There are exceptions, of course, and proponents of cameras can always cherry-pick examples to bolster their argument. These success stories are what convince us; our brains are wired to respond more strongly to anecdotes than to data. But the data are clear: CCTV cameras have minimal value in the fight against crime. […]

The important question isn’t whether cameras solve past crime or deter future crime; it’s whether they’re a good use of resources. They’re expensive, both in money and in their Orwellian effects on privacy and civil liberties. Their inevitable misuse is another cost. […] Though we might be willing to accept these downsides for a real increase in security, cameras don’t provide that.

In August 2009 Schneier discussed a report that showed only one crime per thousand cameras per year is solved because of CCTV and quotes David Davis MP saying that “CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.”

A Home Office study also concluded that cameras had done “virtually nothing” to cut crime (although they were effective in preventing vehicle crimes in car parks), but do “help communities feel safer” (a case of classic security theatre).

• Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites
• Terrorism and Our Responses
• CCTV Prevalence in Britain

Some of the findings:

• Green tea has been shown to lower cholesterol in a large number of studies, but there’s no sign of cancer prevention properties.
• There’s strong evidence showing Omega 3’s cholesterol-lowering abilities and good evidence indicating it can help improve some ADHD behaviour and lower blood pressure. In terms of preventing arthritis and cancer, and in relieving depression, the evidence is conflicting.
• Fish oil has been shown to help lower blood pressure and the risk of secondary heart disease, but the evidence for it improving general health isn’t strong (but is promising).
• Vitamin D is fantastic: great for all-round general health and cancer prevention.
• Vitamins A and E aren’t beneficial for much at all, while vitamin C studies are somewhat conflicting.
• Beta carotene’s position surprised me: there is little-to-no evidence in many studies of any health benefits. The same goes for acai and goji berries, ginkgo biloba and copper.

The raw data used to generate the visualisation is available–along with citations–in a Google document that is occasionally being updated.

• Ideology Getting in the Way of Evidence-Based Medicine
• The Anti-Vaccine Movement and the Rejection of Science
• Vitamins: A Pointless Expense?

In 2005, Boston-based doctors published the very first clinical trial of alcohol-based hand sanitizers in homes and enrolled about 300 families with young children in day care. For five months, half the families got free hand sanitizer and a “vigorous hand-hygiene” curriculum. But the spread of respiratory infections in homes didn’t budge. […] A Columbia University study also found no reduction in common infections among inner-city families given free antibacterial hand soap, detergent, and cleaning supplies. The same year, University of Michigan epidemiologist Allison Aiello summarized data on hand hygiene for the FDA and pointed out that three out of four studies showed that alcohol-based hand sanitizers didn’t prevent respiratory infections. Then, in 2008, the Boston group repeated the study—this time in elementary schools. […] Again, the rate of respiratory infections remained unchanged, though the rate of gastrointestinal infections, which are less common than respiratory infections, did fall slightly. Finally, last October, a report ordered by the Public Health Agency of Canada concluded that there is no good evidence that vigorous hand hygiene practices prevent flu transmission.

The final advice:

Follow the data and get a flu shot, wash your hands sensibly after using the bathroom and around meals, and stop wasting money on hand sanitizers.

via Link Banana, saying “they could (should) have been most explicit on the differences between hand washing […] and hand sanitizers”. Seconded–I’m no longer sure where hand washing fits in this picture.

Note: The Wikipedia article for hand sanitizers paints them in a slightly more positive light, but with many caveats (e.g. alcohol content and duration of exposure to the product is important, etc.).

• Paper Towels vs. Hand Driers
• Selling Hand-Washing to Africa
• The Evidence For (and Against) Health Supplements: a Visualisation

Elmore Leonard’s ten are included, and he summarises them with the following:

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

The article’s been mentioned in a few places, being discussed at length by Intelligent Life and Salon (the latter adding five of their own rules).

• 100 Best Fiction and Non-Fiction of the 20th Century – The Modern Library
• Writing ‘On Writing Well’
• Dava Sobel on Writing Science Books Full-Time

Controlling for environmental factors and the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together […] Christakis and Fowler found that we really do emulate those we care about, whether we mean to or not. Being connected to a happy person, for instance, makes you 15 percent more likely to be happy yourself. “And the spread of happiness doesn’t stop there,” they note. It radiates out for three degrees of separation, so that, say, your sister’s best friend’s husband’s mood exerts a greater influence on your personal happiness than an extra $10,000 in income would. If he gains 50 pounds, it will be that much harder for you to stay slim, as the frame of reference for what’s “normal” changes through your network. Or, on the positive side, if he quits smoking, your chances of kicking the habit improve, too, even if you’ve never met him. […]

Public health workers can more effectively stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases if they know what kind of network they’re dealing with: a hub and spoke (e.g., a prostitute with many clients) or a more transitive “ring” network where people have few partners, but many of these partners overlap (which could happen at a small high school). On another front, they point out that voting makes little sense for an individual—one vote never decides an election—but is far more rational in a network context. As with happiness and obesity, the decision to vote has repercussions through three degrees of connections. […] Since liberals and conservatives tend to form their own social networks, this means that your decision to vote can increase the likelihood of hundreds of other people voting for the same candidate.

I do wonder if these degrees of separation that exert influence on us fluctuate with the size of each ‘degree’?

• The Decay of Social Networks
• Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites
• Identification through Anonymous Social Networking Data

The contributions that appear in the final, published book are freely available as are sixty-eight further contributions that didn’t make it.

This from Don’t Just Learn the Language, Understand its Culture:

Realizing how interwoven foreign words and phrases gave [James Joyce] new ways of expressing himself is something I’ve kept with me in my programming career.

In their seminal book, The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas encourage us to learn a new programming language every year. I’ve tried to live by their advice and throughout the years I’ve had the experience of programming in many languages. My most important lesson from my polyglot adventures is that it takes more than just learning the syntax to learn a language: You need to understand its culture. 
[…]

Once you’ve learned the ropes of a new language, you’ll be surprised how you’ll start using languages you already know in new ways.

Some might argue that Finnegans Wake is unreadable, while others applaud it for its stylistic beauty. To make the book a less daunting read, single language translations are available. Ironically, the first of these was in French. 
Code is in many ways similar. If you write Wakese code with a little Python, some Java, and a hint of Erlang, your projects will be a mess. If you instead explore new languages to expand your mind and get fresh ideas on how you can solve things in different ways, you will find that the code you write in your trusty old language gets more beautiful for every new language you’ve learned.

I guess another could be Don’t Rush?

*Other books in the series (full-content wikis): 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know.

• A Guide for Learning Foreign Languages (Resources)
• The Beauty of Programming
• Anti-Patterns

• Invitation should be a core process, that is essential to using the application – this will maximise the chances that your users do invite new users.
• Keep pulling people back in, rather than letting them forget you after the initial invitation, and make this “reminder” process also be central to the use of the application.
• Be useful even to the lone user, because that lone user is the source of all your other users.
• Remove artificial invitation limits, to recognise the reality that most invitations come from a few very active users, and help those users spread the word.

Tenner also notes–in passing–the concept of the viral loop. Andrew Chen’s take on the loop is the best I’ve read on the topic.

• Overcoming Network Effects
• Resources for Community Building
• Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites

That is the suggestion of Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, who extols the virtues of long-term thinking more eloquently than I’ve heard before:

“As in politics,” he says, “the immediate trumps the important.” Our future-blindness may reflect a basic limitation of the brain. “In so far as brains evolved to cope with everyday life on the savannah, they evolved in a context where you didn’t plan 50 years ahead and you cared about your local community. Although…” A pause. A sip of tea. “Although, it’s odd—I gave a talk at Ely cathedral not long ago. The people who built the cathedral had a limited view of the world. Their world was the fens, and they thought it would end quite soon, but nevertheless built this wonderful structure which is part of our heritage 1,000 years later. And it’s shameful in a way that we, with our longer horizons and greater resources, are reluctant to think 50 years ahead.”

via The Browser

Note: The full article is behind a pay wall. The above quote and the context thereof is available.

• The Most Important Century
• Computing and the Climate
• Can Technology Solve Our Climate Problems?

Strangely, though, it turns out that the health food subsidies actually worsened choices (the study theorises that the shoppers used the ’saved’ money to treat themselves, while still purchasing the unhealthy goods).

Taxes were more effective in reducing calories purchased over subsides. Specifically, taxing unhealthy foods reduced overall calories purchased, while cutting the proportion of fat and carbohydrates and upping the proportion of protein in a typical week’s groceries.

By contrast, subsidizing the prices of healthy food actually increased overall calories purchased without changing the nutritional value at all. It appears that mothers took the money they saved on subsidized fruits and vegetables and treated the family to less healthy alternatives, such as chips and soda pop. Taxes had basically the opposite effect, shifting spending from less healthy to healthier choices.

via Nudge

• Barriers, Not Calories, Influence Eating Habits
• Calorie Counts Don’t Affect Food Decisions
• Psychology of Sales

In the US, the act of speechwriting has gained an almost mythical status. As keepers of the president’s words, the speechwriters are at the centre of government and are objects of fascination. It is a little different in Westminster. There are no “speechwriting offices”. There is no official Downing Street speechwriting team. […] There is none of the collaboration and, as a result, little of the powerful effect. […]

Today, says [historian Simon Schama], it is “highly allergic in our British culture to be extravagantly rhetorical”. To turn a fine phrase suggests duplicity.

As the article later states, when it was discovered that Gordon Brown employed the services of speechwriters for an address to Congress in 2009:

The money – indeed, the very existence of such a service – appeared to come as a shock to us in Britain. It exposed the stark differences between the two countries’ oratorical cultures. In Washington, speechwriting is a professional undertaking; the speechwriter is a known quantity. Here, the idea that time or money has been spent crafting a politician’s presentation arouses suspicion. The realisation that the words are not his own only adds to the sense that they are false.

The article suggests there are three speeches worth remembering in contemporary British politics (Robin Cook’s 2003 Cabinet resignation on the eve of the Iraq war, Tony Blair’s 1999 speech on humanitarian intervention and David Cameron’s 2005 Conservative Party leadership pitch) and begins with some succinct speechwriting ‘tricks’:

Verbal tricks that make a speech fly: contradictions (Blair: “September 11 was not an isolated event, but a tragic prologue”), opposites (Napoleon: “Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is for ever”), phrase reversals (Obama: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America”).

• Story Types for Speeches (and TV)
• Teaching Children to Argue
• Inauguration Roundup