When computers not humans order the worlds knowledge

Women do not direct films according to Google if you type into google

"she directed"

You get Did you mean: "he directed"

Or join the Army... type in "she joined the army"

Did you mean: "he joined the army"

or led, or invented things, or discovered anything

How long will it take them to fix this bug....

Slow Journalism again at the Guardian

Julia Kollewe of the Guardian reports that Right Media is been taken over by Yahoo. This happened yesterday. They announced a conference call yesterday morning at 8am New York Time!

You would think that the Guardian with its Editor pushing for 24/7 news publishing, The Guardian would not be pushing a news story that is nearly 24 hours as news! This keeps happening! Maybe what they are talking about is 247 hour old news.

No Tree No Me

Today the Guardian sent confused messages over planting trees carbon to offset co2. The paper reported that Trees might not be green in carbon offsetting debate. The writer Alok Jha bases his article on a piece of research that was written 4 months ago, and has already been written at the time, by the BBC, and the New Scientist, amongst others.

Dr Greg McPherson, Director, Center for Urban Forest Research refutes the findings applicability to trees grown in urban environments.

The simplified argument of the research by Govindasamy Bala is that in Winter snow reflects the sun greater than trees, therefore forests are bad in northern climates.

In southern England snow is a rare occurrence, so how does Bala research apply to the United Kingdom? Alok Jha report does not address this important question.

Dr McPherson points to a second problem with Bala's paper in that it does not deal with Urban and built up places. The reflectivity (Albedo) of a tree canopy is in the same order of magnitude as a road or a house. So planting a tree does have a net beneficial effect if the tree is planted in a Urban Environment in the northern climates.

I also wonder about about the accuracy of computer simulations like this to predict the future in 100 years times. As super computers models get it so wrong about economic conditions in a year or the weather next month.

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Invisible Hand

Ann Pettifor argues that we are heading towards a financial meltdown because of the amount of borrowing or ‘leverage’ of financial institutions. In her blog post to Comment is Free she gives the example from the Financial Times of somebody been able to leverage 20,000 Euro into nearly 1 million Euro into a hedge fund.

“The answer of course is that both the Bank and the government decline to intervene in such unseemly affairs. The reason? The conduct of hedge funds, banks and mortgage companies is regulated by an "invisible hand". And so effective is this invisible hand at promoting competition amongst banks, for example, that the average interest rate on the virtually costless business of credit card lending is about 12% above base rate - 17.02%. According to the British Bankers Association, fully 75% of credit card balances were bearing this average rate of 17% interest in October, 2006. Debts of a 980,000 leveraged on €20,000; and usurious interest rates of 17%. It hardly bears thinking about. Which is why most do not. All hail the few who do.”

Is the 12% over base rate for credit cards in the UK telling us that we are heading towards financial meltdown. There are two reasons why the Interest rate is so high above base rates, whether as Ann suggests that the invisible hand is not working or that because the market has priced the risk of the meltdown into the interest rate.

The invisible hand theory only works if the market is efficient. There is evidence to suggest that the market for credit cards is not efficient in the UK. The CEO of Barclays, Matt Barrett, admitted in 2003 that some of his cards are so complex he can not work them out. If the largest Credit Card issuer in the UK can not work out the cost of one his banks cards, then the market is not efficient.

When I the consumer tries to work out the cost of a card, I am faced with a multitude of variables. The Interest Rate of New Credit, The Interest Free period, Charges, Late Penalty charges for paying it off, Balance Transfer Interest, Any benefits that I may get like Air Miles or Donations to Charities (Would I be better to give the money directly). To compare credit cards charges is beyond the normal consumer.

Back to Ann arguments about the markets heading to meltdown and her example of a hedge fund, one wonders if the Rich Mans Hedge Fund is the equivalent of the Poor Mans Credit Card. The gearing and risks in the different Hedge Funds are so complex can a man or even a computer work them out?