I know people who work at the institution in question - I would be surprised if there was a link to it

I don't know if Chikatilo was a psychopath, anyhow, psychopaths seem to enjoy hurting others and are usually pretty smart. There is a secure institution where a buch of psychopaths managed to get hold of the manual for a well known profiling instrument that, effectively scored psychopathology from 0 to 40. They then had t-shirts printed with just "Perfect 40" on them. Point being that once something is public knowledge the kinds of people who engage in this kind of activity are likely to pay attention and work to throw predictive algorithms off, simply because they would gain a great deal of satisfation doing so.

Is quite nice, not sure if it meets your ASP needs though

I'm pretty happy with my 44 inch hdtv, this really is all I need in a TV. I can't see the 3D in 3D tv, can't say I much care for it on the big screen either, as you say no 3D effect can surpass a decent story and a decent story does not need 3D.

I agree, up to a point. The thing is, improving education in economically deprived areas leads to well educated people with no means of developing further. They end up knowing that their future is bleak and, my guess is, this may lead to other problems including migration, disenfranchisement and so on. If we really want to improve their economy then I would think communication and infrastructure would be best attended to. Mobile commuications mean that people can play a more productive role in markets. For example, a fisherman can phone ahead to see where he can get the best price for his haul. Similarly, a farmer can find the lowest price for feed and the best price for his crop. And infrastructure, simple things like transport to improve access would help enourmously. How staring at a 13" screen helps is beyond me. It just stikes me as a nice western idea that if we give these guys a computer then all is well. A while back people bought outlying people tractors. They ran out of diesel and they ended up hauling the plough behind cattle.

... to give it it's proper name. Basically, people with similar behaviours end to seek out each others company. For example, heavy drinking smokers will probably find themselves at the bar or outside in smokers' alley. Similarly, ability to survive economically will determine where people can live. If some of these behaviours are genetically determined then they are also more likely to reproduce and so lead to a concentration of those genetic predispositions. But, and this is the bit but, there's a very thin thread between genes and complex behaviours, despite what you might read in the papers. There is a breathtaking array of interactions between, for example, genes and environment in producing behaviour and that are far from being properly inderstood that Baron-Cohen's thesis is, to put it mildly, overinterpreting the available evidence.

They are the Baron-Cohen brothers - one is an academic and one is a film actor. I am unable to judge which is most annoying.

I have heard that some areas have become so reliant on food airdrops that kids, when they are hungry, look up at the sky for their next meal. They are foretting how to find food for themselves. Point being, if these laptops are dropped from the sky they might be inadvertantly eaten.

I like this idea a lot but would like to have the light barrier as the death trap. We need more lasers in the world. With the advantage that mosquitos might evolve to avoid all forms of light, including romantic candle light.

I recall an article in the Econonist a few years back that described a time when a macro economist visited his chum, who worked on a trading desk in a large bank. The economnist basically came away saying that there's simply no time or space for elegant theories in anything that went on in that environment. The science of economics was more applicable to fly fishng than high frequency trading. But I think the real issue for economics is that it has historically been very prescriptive - what people should do - rather than descriptive - explaining what people actually do. This was forcefully highlighted by the psychologist Kahneman, who went on to win the nobel prize for economics. That said, I enjoy economics and do feel it offers a lot to the world. I also think the premise that economic theory didn't predict the economic collapse is wrong. My limited reading of economic theory left me with the impression something was going wrong (in particular Shleifer, A (2000). Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance). But any prediction using economic theory presumes we have access to the evidence required to make accurate predictions. What we are slowly seeing is that, in their rush for profit, institutions effectively hid their exposure to risk. This duplicity, more than anything, compounded by a healthy dose of herd behaviour, is the reason the approaching precipice was obscured.