A rare example of humanistic altruism in the now much hated world of banking comes from Germany. Erika Schmidt, the manager of a bank branch in Germany was found to be transferring money from rich clients into the accounts of those who were heavily in debt. Her lawyer said that “she couldn’t bear to see my less-fortunate customers go hungry”.

Her aim was to stop the struggling accounts from being closed due to lack of funds. When these accounts became solvent again she would largely transfer the money back again. She took no money herself but was found to have transferred a total of 7.6 million Euros between December 2003  and February 2005.

Inevitably despite her interventions some clients never managed to become solvent again and so the bank lost 1.1 million euros due to the bad debt.

A court in Bonn was viewed the altruistic fraud leniently by handing out a 22 month suspended jail term.

It is reported that the manager lost her job and now lives off a small pension.Her lawyer said “She did it out of compassion for people and now she is as poor as a church mouse herself”

Photo by marie-ll under this creative commons license

Source

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• ‘Robin Hood’ bank manager accused of stealing to help poor (telegraph.co.uk)

I listened with interest to this morning’s phone in on Five Live which looked at the worries of youngsters on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace following criticisms of those networks for not putting any kind of help button on the site for people that are experiencing bullying or child abuse. Bebo a site that is perhaps bigger in the UK than the rest of the world has put such a help button on their own social networking site.

What soon became apparent as the debate developed was that:

• Most parents were unaware that these sites had a starting age limit of 13 years.
• Parents had allowed some children as young as 7 years to sign up to social networking sites
• Parents largely gave in to peer pressure such as “but all my friends are on it”.
• Youngsters like to be seen to have as many friends as possible
• Some youngsters can have as many as 600 contacts most of whom they don’t know in real life
• Youngsters are more tech savvy than their parents so parents leave most things to their children

I was surprised at the extent to which some parents were prepared to just blank this aspect of parental responsibility. One local authority had run a free course to help parents get helpful information on how to manage access to social networking sites but only two parents availed themselves of the workshop.

18 age limit on xbox360

An example of age limiting access to such sites comes in the form of  Microsoft who have just launched access to social networking sites on their Xbox 360 games console but are to actively block access for users below the age of 18 by only allowing  gold membership users to access the services (a 12 month paid for fee is payable to unlock access). Don’t go thinking that Microsoft are doing this purely in the name of being responsible. It’s probably just as likely being implemented to reduce their liability as much as anything else.

Whose Responsibility?

I know many parents are just going to use the excuse that their children are the tech savvy members of the family but isn’t it about setting barriers, getting informed, getting help, taking responsibility and putting appropriate measures in place to safeguard your children?

Easy for me to say I know but I must admit I was a little taken aback at the buck passing by some parents with regard to this.

social networking image by 10ch under this creative commons license

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The Netherlands government are getting serious about abolishing road tax and a current 25% sales tax on cars and replacing them with a per kilometer fee in an effort to cut car congestion and carbon dioxide emissions.

If the law is passed then it would come into effect in 2012 for Netherlands drivers and implemented for foreign motorists in 2018.

The proposed system would rely on each car being fitted with a GPS device that would send data regarding distances travelled to an appropriate revenue collection agency.

Initially a charge of 3 Euro cents per kilometer would be charged rising to 6.7 Euro cents by 2018.

If successfully introduced then the rest of Europe will be watching closely as to how effective a measure it is in achieving its stated objectives.

Photo lbsterling under this creative commons license

“If that underclass increases relentlessly over time, and if you start seeing more educated people getting dragged into it, then we are going to have a huge problem. I think that may happen as machines and computers keep getting better until eventually they can do the jobs of even people with lots of education and training. At that point I think you have to do something,”

Martin Ford identifies the possible down sides of technology in a capitalist society in his book: The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future

Ford is presumably no Luddite by nature. His main profession is as a computer engineer.

30 years ago similar sooth sayers were predicting a future of increased leisure time as technology took the drudgery out of work and provided an unprecedented standard of living for all. The decade that followed that prediction saw, in the UK anyway, a huge increase in the number of hours that people worked and as old industries crumbled to give way to a service based economy, a growing underclass and social divide. Martin Ford seems to hint that it’s probably capitalism that needs to be regulated rather than the growth of technology in isolation.

At the same time as this forecast of a utopian world of increased technology there were more realistic forecasts such as Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave with it’s vision of a post industrial society and the end of ‘a job for life’.

We seem to be some way into that post industrial third wave. Is Ford hinting that technology is merely hastening the collapse of the post industrial society or just highlighting that with out certain checks and balances many of us in the future may unexpectedly travel rapidly backwards along the metaphorical escalator of social mobility.

Is technology just a tool? It’s how we deploy it that creates the benefits and/or disadvantages isn’t it?

Photo by Sammy0716 under this creative common license

There are, believe it or not 600,000 Freesat users in the United Kingdom. In the run up to Xmas there will be a renewed awareness campaign for the free-to-air satellite cousin of Freeview (the free-to-air via your TV aerial digital service).

Xmas Bonus

Freesat owners will be getting an early Xmas present with the arrival of the BBC iPlayer service for Freesat boxes that can connect to the Internet. Mostly this tends to be for HD boxes that already have the requisite ethernet socket.
Also a small number of (OK two) locations will be enabling HD content for Freeview itself as the first generation HD capable Freeview boxes go on sale. Expect to see existing non HD set top boxes and PVRs drop in price as old stock is cleared.

Blank Canvas

Meanwhile the BBC trust has been told that Project Canvas, the joint venture between BBC,ITV, Five and BT to bring on demand content to viewers via  suitably enabled TV sets and Internet enabled set top boxes will likely cost more than £115 million in the first fours years of its operation with £17 million recouped via revues the service will bring in at the end of this period. Questions remain as to what extent ITV and Five would be in a sound financial position to afford the estimated £25 million a piece that they’d be required to put into the funding pot.

Project Canvas has been a contentious undertaking in that it allows non-public service broadcasters to become partners with the bbc which was not the case when originally conceived. BSkyB would be welcome to provide services on the platform but cannot become a partner in the project.

Kangaroo Court

Canvas also has to walk carefully in the shadow of the now defunct Project Kangaroo which proposed a consolidated video on demand (VOD) platform with content from BBC Worldwide,ITV.com and Channel 4’s 4OD which was planned to launch in 2008 but was eventually blocked by the competition commission this year.

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The Beeb looks at how Sweden, known as probably Europe’s most transparent democracy manage their own MPs expenses and accommodation needs. Whilst watching the report I kept saying to myself ‘ah but how much is their salary’ and it turns out it’s on par with our own UK politicians.So no excuses then?

OK, I’m never sure how useful it is to examine how other cultures do things especially when it would take a sea change in our own culture sometimes to achieve the same though it’s probably a useful yardstick for the ideal (wanders off to daydream of the ideal).

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The BBC has launched a new web site dedicated to live and on demand coverage of the UK’s national political institutions and the European parliament. Interesting to launch at a time when our faith in political institutions is being sorely tested. Who knows maybe such sites are a flag stone on the road to a greater interaction between voters and the institutions that claim to act on their behalf.

BBC Democracy Live

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“…They just looked at me and said, ‘What? We really can’t show that at all.’ So I said what do you want, and they said, ‘We had Patsy Kensit in today and that was good.’ She said, ‘Culture is buying my daughter an ice-cream at the Natural History Museum.’ So that’s what you’re up against. That’s the level of banality that’s desired.”

Frankie Boyle shares his views and talks about ‘My shit life so far’.

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The BBC’s Horizon is perhaps not the TV programme  it once was (some have accused it of dumbing down of late) but it can still provoke thought. Monday evenings TV outing tried to answer what exactly is consciousness albeit simplified to the question ‘Where am I? ‘. I’m not sure that anyone can answer that for certain but for me it raised an almost worrying prospect that the body influences the mind just as much as the mind influences the body.

In my own thoughts (wherever they may begin and end) I’ve probably just thought of the body as a shell for the ‘I’ inside.

I and you without a body move

The prospect that consciousness could even just  be the side effect of neurons firing in a particular way and reliant on a certain biological structure in the physical brain perhaps dents my own feeling the ‘I’ inside the body would desperately enjoy being freed from the constraints of the physical body. It sound much more like a co-dependency arrangement.

The point at which we become self aware seems related to a certain point in our development. Perhaps even at a point that the physical brain reaches a certain point of physical formation. The body may even be the one that’s really in the driving seat.

The programme also dealt cast a modicum of doubt over the notion of autonomous free will and determination. Maybe we are more at the mercy of random electrical impulses than we would like to contemplate.

For UK viewers the Horizon programme is still available for a while on the BBC iPlayer

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The phone-in on the radio in the background tells me that there’s not a lot of love lost between the public and the humble postal worker as the prospect of strikes loom.

I find it quite sad how many people can only see the how a strike would inconvenience them rather than any degree of empathy for a rapidly diminished workforce who are enduring an antagonistic management and a government hell bent of paving the service for part privatisation.

Meanwhile much of Britain at times unable to put themselves in the shoes of others and finds it easier to believe that everybody else is having a cushier time than they are.

Striking, it has to be said, is seen in this instance as akin to a man with a gun at his own head and threatening to blow his own brains out if he doesn’t get what he wants. Unlike say France striking seems to be a less effective bargaining chip in this country  perhaps because in Britain today there is much less of a sense in the wider population that we are all ‘in it together’ any more.

In this environment it would seem that the public has probably now been won over to the prospect of opening up the domestic postal service to commercial competition.

Another one bites the dust. Will we miss it when it’s gone or is it just  now a service that is past its metaphorical sell by date?

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BBC4 explores the historical quirk that was Synth Britannia on October 16th (with the usual time shifted repeats on and around that date). Obviously of interest to anyone who ever fiddled around with a synthesizer (that’d include me then) or anyone who has a passing interest in the influence that the early years of electronic music had on the British music scene of the late 70’s to early 80’s.

Also this autumn BBC4 will be exploring Metal Britannia. Not sure I’ll go out of my way for that one but each to their own musical tastes eh.