Courtesy of the Financial Times, the latest news on the financial sector's most self-allegorizing activity: death hedging.  Or more prosaically, the develpment of 'longevity derivatives' and associated indices, through which fund managers can hedge against the risk that people (not to speak of broker-dealers) might not die soon enough.  In this update, Deutsche Börse has introduced live (so to speak) data feeds from undertakers to find out the age of the bodies they bury.

Death data drive new market

From Private Eye, a brief update on the lie detector system soon to be used across the UK on suspected 'benefit thieves'*, i.e. all claimants.  The system comes from Mossad, but what's really alarming is that it is administered by scorched-earth PFI war machine Capita.
*NB. Readers with no sympathy for 'benefit thieves' have come to the wrong website.

Outsourcing
LIE OF THE LAND

Lie–detector technology developed by Mossad for interrogating suspeted Palestinian terrorists is being used in British Jobcentres.

We are standing on the brink of an immense revelation. The revelation of people to states. In the UK – the surveillance workshop of the world – people are becoming increasingly visible through IT projects like the Electronic Patients Record and the National Identity Register, as well as a forthcoming points-based immigration regime premised on the ability to identify subjects and then track and cross-reference their data as never before. Joining-up data, and hence governance, is the name of the game.

Another stitched-up ALMO vote just in time for the upgrading of housing (i.e. mortgagee home 'ownership') to Top Government Priority!  (For those of you who've just joined us, an ALMO is the pre-privatization of council estates palmed off either by Brezhnevite 'voting', as here in Lambeth, or by simple decree, as in Hackney, on tenants who stubbornly fail to volunteer for transfer to the private sector.)  In this case the miraculous 51% majority was delivered by excluding 'spoiled' answers to questions like:

This Anarchist Federation analysis of the National (UK) ID Database, parts of which are already up and running with no need for cards, needs to be read as widely as possible.  A terrifying account of how much more than abstract 'privacy' is at stake, and FOR WHOM.

Wireless and social networking technologies depend on and help shape the global logistics industry. This worldwide supply chain ensures just-in-time production responds to consumer demand, whether it be books from Amazon or exhaust pipes for Jaguars.

If, contra to theorists of ‘immaterial labour’, the mass worker is not dead but reconfigured, will networked production and distribution see the rise of networked labour struggles?

The Survival Scrapbooks are a series of six books published in the early-1970s covering different aspects of autonomous living from a practical perspective.  Several authors contributed to the series, often with additional input from others.  The titles in the series, and their authors, were:

volume 1: Shelter, 1972 - Stefan Szczelkun
contents: different forms of wild, mobile, or simple-to-build accommodation including caves, hand-made tents, wooden huts, and vans.

Steve Wright reviews Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age
by Tiziana Terranova

Tiziana Terranova is a name familiar to readers of Mute. Issue 28 carried a lively and informative discussion between Terranova and Marc Bousquet, addressing the contemporary university as both node of accumulation and site of social conflict.1 Of her other writings to date, pride of place goes to an influential essay on the peculiarities of that labour which capital has sought to subsume to its digital economy.2

In the latest edition of The Yale Anthology of French Poetry the academic canon is extended once again. Howard Slater explores the incompatibility between poetry and the academy

Melanie Gilligan casts a sceptical eye over Richard Doyle’s ‘postvital’ experiments

Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living, Richard Doyle, Minnesota Press, 2003

‘Ontologies’ structure the information in databases (think Semantic Webs or library card indexes). But who gets to design these semantic motors and what are they built to do? Taking Friendster and Wikipedia as two collective databasing projects which respectively fail to realise the social and structuring potential of ontologies, Paul Ford suggests a better application based on a fusion of the two