I’ve just read this at just gone midnight on the 26th of October 2006, I read the article I am link to about 10 minutes before making my entry in my blog. [the timing has gone weird on my blog!]

The link is here

But I’m going to copy a bit of text so you can get the gist of it if the New York Times end up pulling the article from the public domain.

October 26, 2006
A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data
By TOM ZELLER Jr.

If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks, searching Google for “Jon Kyl,” the Republican senator from Arizona now running for re-election, will produce high among the returns a link to an April 13 article from The Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly.

Mr. Kyl “has spent his time in Washington kowtowing to the Bush administration and the radical right,” the article suggests, “very often to the detriment of Arizonans.”

Searching Google for “Peter King,” the Republican congressman from Long Island, would bring up a link to a Newsday article headlined “King Endorses Ethnic Profiling.”

Fifty or so other Republican candidates have also been made targets in a sophisticated “Google bombing” campaign intended to game the search engine’s ranking algorithms. By flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.

The project was originally aimed at 70 Republican candidates but was scaled back to roughly 50 because Chris Bowers, who conceived it, thought some of the negative articles too partisan.

The articles to be used “had to come from news sources that would be widely trusted in the given district,” said Mr. Bowers, a contributor at MyDD.com (Direct Democracy), a liberal group blog. “We wanted actual news reports so it would be clear that we weren’t making anything up.”

Daily Mail today:

Britons ‘spend 40% of wages on their mortgage’
By BECKY BARROW and SAM FLEMING, Daily Mail 12:30pm 29th June 2006

More than 40 per cent of a homeowner’s take-home pay is now being wiped out by mortgage repayments, Britain’s biggest building society revealed yesterday.

Nationwide warned that this is the highest level since the dark days of the 1991 recession when house prices fell sharply.

It comes as the total amount owed by Britain’s 11.6 million home-owners soared to more than £1 trillion for the first time.

At this level, people’s massive mortgage debts of £1,006,796,000,000 are nearly equal to the country’s entire economic output, or GDP.

The country’s gross domestic product is £1.2 trillion, but yesterday’s Bank of England figures show the total amount of mortgage debt is catching up fast.

Soaring house prices, which have been rising for a decade, have forced anybody wanting to get onto the property ladder to take out a huge home loan.

The average mortgage has jumped to a massive £115,000, with many people forced to borrow much more to buy a decent home in the South.

In 1986, the average mortgage was just £25,000. Ten years later, it was still just £44,000 but it has now more than quadrupled over the last two decades.

Today’s huge mortgages mean that millions of homeowner’s take-home pay is eaten up by their repayments before a single other bill is paid.

The problem has rapidly got worse, the Nationwide said yesterday as it revealed house prices have jumped £8,000 over the last year to an average of £165,730.

In 2003, about a third of the take-home pay of a home-owner on average earnings was spent on mortgage repayments. Today, it is 42 per cent.

The calculation is based on a person on average take-home pay of £20,500 buying a typical home worth £165,000 and borrowing a mortgage of £125,000. The repayment mortgage would have an interest rate of 5.09 per cent.

Fionnuala Earley, Nationwide’s group economist, said: ‘The deterioration in affordability and its likely impact cannot be ignored.’

She warned that people’s ability to pay their mortgages will ‘continue to bite’ unless the situation changes.

The worry is that if mortgage repayments eat up more of people’s take-home pay, they will have less and less money to cope with the rest of their financial commitments.

Link to full article

here

This was the question debated at a Computer Journal Lecture, which began with the following presentation by Robin Milner of Cambridge University, followed by the discussion below….

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.4708 Read the rest of Robin’s presentation:

• Modelling Ubiquity
• Software science for ubiquitous systems
• Models as languages
• Two experiments
• A tower of models
• Goals for the challenge
• Projects to meet the challenge
• Coda
• Acknowledgements and References

Discussion

1. Morris Sloman, Department of Computing, Imperial College London
2. Martyn Thomas, Martyn Thomas Associates, UK
3. Karen Spark-Jones, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
4. Jon Crowcroft, Cambridge University
5. Marta Kwiatkowska, University of Birmingham
6. Paul Gardner, Head of Pervasive ICT Research Centre, BT Group Chief Technology Office, British Telecommunications
7. Nicholas R Jennings, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
8. Vladimiro Sassone ECS, University of Southampton
9. Eamonn O’Neil, Department of Computer Science, University of Bath
10. Michael Wooldridge, Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool
11. Carsten Maple, Institute for Research in Applicable Computing, Department of Computing and Information Systems, University of Luton
12. George Coulouris, Digital Technology Group, Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University
13. Dan Chalmers, Department of Informatics, University of Sussex

Implementation of replacement hardware.