Group items tagged

this is how living in the COVID era can feel. We know that an unprecedented economic cataclysm has rippled across the globe. But the precise consequences of this catastrophe - for the global economy, geopolitics, climate change, and our own little lives - remain opaque.

An alternative is to have machines pick up the slack on productivity and share the gain with the people displaced so their work week shortens and their quality of life increases.

"How the 'emotional contagion' of memes makes them the internet's moral conscience By Allie Volpe Aug 27, 2018, 11:30am EDT Illustration by Alex Castro & Keegan Larwin SHARE Newly single, Jason Donahoe was perusing Tinder for the first time since it started integrating users' Instagram feeds. Suddenly, he had an idea: follow the Instagram accounts of some of the women he'd been interested in but didn't match with on the dating service. A few days later, he considered taking it a step further and direct messaging one of the women on Instagram. After all, the new interface of the dating app seemed to encourage users to explore other areas of potential matches' online lives, so why not take the initiative to reach out? Before he had a chance, however, he came across the profile of another woman whose Tinder photo spread featured a meme with Parks and Recreation character Jean-Ralphio Saperstein (Ben Schwartz) leaning into the face of Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) with the caption: hey I saw you on Tinder but we didn't match so I found your Instagram you're so beautiful you don't need to wear all that makeup ahah I bet you get a lot of creepy dm's but I'm not like all those other guys message me back beautiful btw what's your snap "I was like, 'Oh shit, wow,'" Donahoe says. Seeing his potential jerk move laid out so plainly as a neatly generalized joke, he saw it in a new light. "I knew a) to be aware of that, and b) to cut that shit out … It prompted self-reflection on my part." THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MEMES STRIKE A CULTURAL CHORD AND CAN GUIDE AND EVEN INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR Donahoe says memes have resonated with him particularly when they depict a "worse, extreme version" of himself. For Donahoe, the most successful memes are more than just jokes. They "strike a societal, cultural chord" and can be a potent cocktail for self-reflection as tools that can guide and even influence behavior. In the months leading up to the 2016 US

"Epigenetic Changes Programmed Into Future Generations But the most disturbing finding was that atrazine had epigenetic effects. Epigenetics is the theory that environmental factors, such as diet, lifestyle choices and pesticides can impact the health of people who are exposed to them and also their descendants. Human DNA, according to epigenetics, is not unchangeable; it can be altered by such environmental factors. Epigenetic changes can be imprinted on the DNA of a fetus during pregnancy according to Winchester."

Given time, biology will advance to the point where things can be done that cannot be defined right now, such as changing the way people think; changing their allegiance; diseases which cannot be cured or treated or prevented; a Pandora's box," he told The Current's guest host Gillian Findlay.

Until now, research into regime shifts has focused on critical environmental thresholds, or "tipping points," in external conditions-eg when crossing a certain temperature threshold triggers a sudden shift to desertification. But the new model by Catalina Chaparro-Pedraza and SFI External Professor André de Roos, both at the University of Amsterdam, reveals how a small change in the external environment, with little immediate impact, can induce slow evolutionary changes in the species that inhabit the system. After what the researchers call a "considerable delay," wherein species slowly evolve a new trait or behavior over generations, the regime shift manifests as a delayed reaction.

" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o

"I'm going to teach a new course this fall, tentatively titled "Technology and Social Change". It's going to include an examination of the four levers of social change Larry Lessig suggests in Code and which I've been exploring as possible paths to civic engagement. It will include deep methodological dives into codesign, and into using anthropology as tool for understanding user needs. It will look at unintended consequences, cases where technology's best intentions fail, and cases where careful exploration and preparation led to technosocial systems that make users and communities more powerful than they were before."

If you want to understand an ecosystem, look at what the species within it eat. In studying food webs-how animals and plants in a community are connected through their dietary preferences-ecologists can piece together how energy flows through an ecosystem and how stable it is to climate change and other disturbances. Studying ancient food webs can help scientists reconstruct communities of species, many long extinct, and even use those insights to figure out how modern-day communities might change in the future. There's just one problem: only some species left enough of a trace for scientists to find eons later, leaving large gaps in the fossil record-and researchers' ability to piece together the food webs from the past.

Great powers rise and fall, shaping each transitional period of global power shift and its geographic concentration. Currently, the world is witnessing a profound transformation in the geopolitical arena of international affairs. For the past years, the pundits have been propagating the emergence of an Asian multipolar century, with a shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific realm. However, following the COVID-19 virus outbreak, this year marks the obvious manifestation of an Indo-Pacific decade, with the US, China, and potentially India being the main protagonists in an emerging competition. This time, it is the unfolding of regional centres of power, which create the delusive impression of multipolarity, while in fact a new systemic bipolarity between the US and China comes to light. In the post-COVID-19 global context, the virus has become a catalyst of multiple systemic changes, inducing ad hoc constellations of regional actors-shaped by their geopolitical and geoeconomic interests-in a changing global order with eroding multilateral structures.

This sort of late-breaking Democratic vote is the new, though still underappreciated, normal in national elections. Americans have become accustomed to knowing who won our elections promptly, but there are many legitimate votes that are not counted immediately every election year. For reasons that are not totally understood by election observers, these votes tend to be heavily Democratic, leading results to tilt toward Democrats as more of them are counted, in what has become known as the "blue shift." In most cases, the blue shift is relatively inconsequential, changing final vote counts but not results. But in others, as in 2018, it can materially change the outcome.