news and politics
Location-based services, privacy, loss and exposure
There’s a big hoohah right now over Yahoo!’s new offering of location-based services, yet precious little has been written or said about the second-generation iPhone 3G’s incorporation of a GPS chip that is used by a variety of applications you can buy or get for free from Apple’s App Store. Other mobile devices are playing catch-up, but it seems likely that over the next year personalised GPS services will explode in popularity, following on from the sat-navs that have, in a few short years, become must-have devices for all but the most technophobic—or, at least, technowary—vehicle drivers.
tags: App Store, Apple, biology, class, consumers, culture, data protection, Google Maps, GPS, human beings, iPhone 3G, location-based services, morality, privacy, public, respect, sat-navs, sexual liberation, values, Yahoo!Abandon northern English cities to the rats and pigeons, argues Tory-influencing think tank
Proving conclusively that the phrase ‘think tank’ is misleading in suggesting that such influential groups actually involve any thinking, a think tank has announced that northern England cities such as Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford are ‘beyond revival’ and residents should move south. Policy Exchange is a very influential right-wing think tank credited with many ideas taken up by the Conservative Party under David Cameron.
Policy Exchange said current regeneration policies were ‘failing’ the people they were supposed to help, and that a mass migration to London, Cambridge and Oxford would stop them becoming ‘trapped’ in poorer areas. One of the report authors, Tim Leunig, a lecturer in economic history at the London School of Economics, has acknowledged this may be seen as ‘barmy’. A Liverpool Labour MP, Peter Kilfoyle, has called it ‘utter nonsense’.
tags: Bradford, Cambridge, Conservatives, Liverpool, London, madness, northern, Oxford, policy, southern, suburban, Sunderland, think tanks, urban
