Heartbreak over cub confiscation BBC
Children concerned by parents’ web habits The Local
A quarter of adults to face ‘anti-paedophile’ tests Telegraph. Key section:
But the increase in child protection measures is so great it is “poisoning” relationships between the generations, according to respected sociologist Professor Frank Furedi….As a result ordinary parents – many of whom are volunteers at sports and social clubs – now find themselves regarded “potential child abusers”.
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete Wired. Worth reading, but I remember when Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history. Similarly, as to the infallibility of Google’s ad choices, this site too often features Google-provided links to payday lenders, right wing causes, and oddball trading schemes (I checked over just now and see the top left ad is “Free Cattle Forecasts”). Remember, the classic remark about advertising: “50% of spending is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%.” So Google Adsense is competing in an area where the existing standards are low. Dunno about you, but I’m not ready to entrust Google with science.
How to Save Money on Gas, Without Driving Less Political Calculations (hat tip Econbrowser). A tool to check the impact of driving speed on fuel consumption.
Obama backs union in Tesco fight Guardian
Take That PEG Ratio and Shove It Captain Capitalism
Fed Watch: Cutting It Down the Middle Tim Duy, Economist’s View. Duy parses the FOMC release and concludes that a rate rise is more likely for September-October than August.
Love Markets: Putting Out Efficiency Long or Short Capital
Antidote du jour:
russell1200 
Posts
That Wired “End of Science” article is classic Wired wankery. There are actually some interesting questions about how the scientific method generalizes to situations where complexity makes simple analytical predictions hard to come by or downright misleading. But those questions are a lot older than Google — or computer technology itself, for that matter.
The problem is that “sciences” like economics just can’t get as much mileage out of traditional scientific method because you can’t do controlled experiments at will or quickly enough, or at all. So you resort to statistical models. Those models (as George Box pointed out) have *always* been second best (or fifteenth best …) but just collecting more data doesn’t reduce the urgency of modeling at all. It probably creates some opportunities for different, perhaps better, modeling. Data mining and pattern recognition are just modeling of a different kind — looking for more compact representations of a blizzard of data points.
But trust Wired to draw the wrong conclusion and assert breathlessly that hot company du jour is the source of all worthwhile thinking. Any mag so chock full of dumb, sensationalist, unreadable tripe cover-to-cover should be titled not “Wired”, but “Trashed”.