Skip to main content

Home/ Long Game/ Group items tagged technology

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
anonymous

MIT's Food Printer: The Greenest Way To Cook? - 0 views

www.treehugger.com/...mits-food-printer.php

layscience technology sustainability food

shared by anonymous on 13 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory that brings the versatility of the digital world to the realm of cooking. In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients.
  • Just imagine the impact this would have. Real food rots. It has peels. Half of it is wasted. The whole infrastructure of food stores with their refrigerated cases becomes unnecessary. And imagine, no more pesky farmers markets occupying valuable parking lots. This is truly green.
  • anonymous on 13 Aug 10
     
    "Everyone is talking about local food, farmers markets and like, cooking? Who has time for that? And really, is Michael Pollan serious with his Rule #2- 'Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.' Why bother even having an MIT if you are going to think that way?" By Lloyd Alter at Treehugger on January 15, 2010.
anonymous

Political Cartoons: The Lowest Form of Communication (Part 1) - 0 views

www.cracked.com/lowest-form-communication.html

visualization criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 13 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Whether you agree or disagree with the message is irrelevant, as these cartoons are often shitty ass vehicles for any message. Taken on average, political cartoons are the least effective way of making a point aside from suicide bombing and Internet petitions.
  • #5. Pictures Requiring Excessive Labels
  • it doesn't matter whether you agree with the message. It's important that we not get caught up in that. The issue is that it's irritating no matter what message they're trying to convey.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • "Technology... uh... Exists"
  • #3. Straw Men
  • If you've spent time arguing with people on the Internet, you know that "straw man" is something you can yell at people arguing with you, and you might even know what it means. If not, it means you create a caricature of your opponent and put stupid arguments into its mouth that you can easily demolish; arguments they never made.
  • Let's put that aside for a second and apply the straw man technique to a less controversial subject, like that your son Tommy should eat his vegetables.
  • It will amuse other people who already agree with you, and that's it.
  • Is that the goal? If you want to make yourself a shiny trophy saying how smart you are compared to the other guy, just go order one. They have catalogs. Why disguise it as an argument?
  • anonymous on 13 Aug 10
     
    "In theory, political cartoons should be a means to get a controversial point across in a concise, effective and humorous way. In reality, most usually convey less information than, say, grunting or gesturing." By Christina H at Cracked.com on August 3, 2010.
anonymous

The Geopolitics of France: Maintaining Its Influence in a Changing Europe - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...tralized_system_guarding_plain

geopolitics france

shared by anonymous on 14 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Mountain ranges inhibit trade and armies alike while peninsulas and islands limit the ability of larger powers to intimidate or conquer smaller ones. Because of such features, it isn’t as much of a surprise that Europe has never united under a single government as it is that anyone has ever tried.
  • two other geographic features that push Europe together
  • The first is the North European Plain
  • ...58 more annotations...
  • Northern Europe is home to the densest concentration of wealth in the world
  • The second feature — the Mediterranean Sea — plays a similar role to the continent’s south
  • Mix the geographic features that inhibit unification with the features that facilitate trade and communication and Europe becomes a very rich, very violent place.
  • three places on the Continent where this pattern of fragmentation does not hold
  • The first are the Seine and Loire river valleys
  • The second and third places where the fragmentation pattern does not hold are the Garonne and Rhone river valleys
  • The one thing these three geographic exceptions have in common is that they all have long resided in the political entity known as France.
  • France is nearly always engaged but is only rarely ascendant.
  • Mountain chains, rivers and seas therefore enclose France at all points save for one: the North European Plain.
  • Internally, aside from the Massif Central in the southeast, France is a country of relatively low-lying terrain with occasional hills.
  • The Beauce region is therefore the French core.
  • Paris is also close enough to the Atlantic — connected by the Seine — to benefit from oceanic trade routes but far enough away to be insulated somewhat from a direct naval invasion.
  • In comparison with its continental neighbors, France has almost always been at an economic advantage because of its geography.
  • Phase I: Centralization (843-1453)
  • The Beauce region of France has always been the core of the French state because of its fertile land and strategic location on the North European Plain.
  • Early France faced two problems, both rooted in geography.
  • The first dealt with the plains.
  • The solution to this military reality was feudalism.
  • French, one of the Langue d’oil, did not become the official tongue until the 1500s, and linguistic unification was not completed until the 1800s.
  • England considered continental France their playpen for much of the Middle Ages. In fact, the Norman leaders of England did not distinguish much between their French and English possessions
  • As in the conflict with the Muslims, it was a technological innovation that forced France’s political system to evolve, and this time the shift was toward centralization rather than decentralization.
  • The combination of the political disasters of the feudal period and the success of consolidation in the battles with the English served as the formative period of the French psyche.
  • Phase II: The Hapsburg Challenge and Balance of Power (1506-1700)
  • Europe’s Hapsburg era was a dangerous time for the French.
  • In three major wars — the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763, against Britain in North America) — France expended great financial resources in efforts to dominate one region or another, only to emerge at each war’s end with little to show for its efforts.
  • Phase III: Nationalism and the Rise of Germany (1789-1945)
  • two equally damning results
  • First, the depleted treasury led to a general breakdown in internal order, contributing to the French Revolution of 1789.
  • Second, Paris’ distraction with England and Spain led it to miss the emergence of Prussia as a serious European power that began to first rival and ultimately superseded Hapsburg Austria for leadership among the cacophony of German kingdoms.
  • One of the many unintended side effects of the French Revolution was the concept of nationalism,
  • From nationalism grew the nation-state, a political entity that harnesses all people sharing a similar ethnicity into a single governing unit.
  • The result was the one near-unipolar moment in European history.
  • Not only was France the only state to have embraced the concept of nationalism, but it also grafted the concept onto an already centralized system, allowing French power to pour forth across Europe and North Africa.
  • From 1803 to 1815, France nearly overwhelmed the rest of Europe before a coalition of nearly every major and minor power on the Continent combined forces to defeat her.
  • The lesson was a simple one, again rooted in geography. Even when France is united and whole, even when she is not under siege, even when her foes are internally distracted and off balance, even when she is led by one of the greatest organizational and military minds in human history, even when she holds the advantage of nationalism — she still lacks the resources and manpower to rule Europe.
  • But most of all the advantage of nationalism spread. Over the next few decades the political innovation of the nation-state spread throughout Europe and in time became a global phenomenon.
  • The culmination of this dichotomy was the events of May-June 1940, when the French military crumbled in less than six weeks. The defeat was by no means solely the result of geopolitical forces, but it sprang from the fundamental imbalance of power between France and a unified Germany.
  • Phase IV: Managing Germany
  • as France is concerned, however, STRATFOR views the entire post-World War II era as a single chapter in French history that has yet to come to a conclusion. In this phase, France is attempting to find a means to live with Germany, a task greatly complicated by recent shifts in the global political geography.
  • And far from being exposed and vulnerable, France found itself facing the most congenial constellation of forces in its history.
  • The stated gains of the EEC/EU have always been economic and political, but the deeper truth is that the European project has always been about French geopolitical fear and ambition.
  • Eventually the Cold War ended, and the Soviet collapse was perceived very differently in France. While most of the free world celebrated, the French fretted.
  • the Soviet collapse led to the reunification of Germany — and that was a top-tier issue.
  • Twenty years on, Germany cannot abandon the European Union without triggering massive internal economic dislocations because of the economic evolutions Maastricht has wrought.
  • that leaves the French with two long-term concerns.
  • First, the cage breaks, Germany goes its own way and attempts to remake Europe to suit its purposes.
  • Second, the cage holds, but it constrains France more than Germany.
  • Geopolitical Imperatives
  • Secure a Larger Hinterland
  • France is the only country on the North European Plain that has an option for expansion into useful territories beyond its core without directly clashing with another major power.
  • Always Look East
  • Being situated at the western end of the North European Plain makes France the only country on the plain that has only one land approach to defend against.
  • Maintain Influence in Regions Beyond Western Europe
  • Unlike the United Kingdom, whose expansion into empire was a natural step in its evolution as a naval power, France’s overseas empire was almost wholly artificial.
  • These colonial assets served one more critical role for Paris: They were disposable.
  • Louisiana was sold for loose change in order to fund the Napoleonic wars, while Algeria was ultimately abandoned — despite being home to some 1 million ethnic French — so that Charles de Gaulle could focus attention on more important matters at home and in the rest of Europe.
  • Be Flexible
  • Geopolitics is not ideological or personal, although few countries have the discipline to understand that.
  • anonymous on 14 Sep 10
     
    "France is bound by the Alps in the southeast and the Pyrenees in the southwest, the Mediterranean Sea in the south and the Atlantic in both the west and north. In the east, France is bound by the river Rhine and the low mountains of the Ardennes, Vosges and Jura." At StratFor on September 13, 2010.
anonymous

Russia's Focus Shifts to the East - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...0929_russias_focus_shifts_east

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 30 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Russia is a country that spans nearly the entire Eastern Hemisphere. As such, while its core and core interests are in the West, it has natural interests in the East as well.
  • Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Indonesia are hungry for military, energy, nuclear and space technology — something that Russia also happens to have copious amounts of and is increasingly sending their way.
  • Even better for Russia, the East Asia region is one where Moscow does not need to attempt to exert hegemony the way it does in Europe.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In geopolitics there is no such thing as permanent allies — only alliances of necessity or convenience — and while a dynamic East Asia could present some convenient relationships now, this convenience can quickly change, whether through economic stagnation, political realignment or other means.
  • Russia is becoming more involved in the region at a time when the region’s economic and security conditions are changing rapidly, and changing in ways that suggest heightening competition.
  • anonymous on 30 Sep 10
     
    "Over the past few years, Russia has finally achieved a degree of security that allows it to turn its attention to its neighbors to the east. It is true that these eastern neighbors are thousands of desolate Siberian miles from the Russian core of Moscow and St. Petersburg. But they are important to Russia nonetheless, as Medvedev's comments about the Kurils indicate. This eastern front, which not only includes the heavyweights of China and Japan but also dynamic players like Vietnam and Indonesia, has of late seen a notable increase in attention from Russia. These interactions raise interesting questions, not only about what is going on now, but also what this could bring - in terms of opportunities, risks and challenges - in the future." At StratFor on September 30, 2010
anonymous

Better ways to engineer Earth's climate to prevent dangerous global warming - 0 views

www.labspaces.net/...event_dangerous_global_warming

shared by anonymous on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Keith, a global leader in investigating this topic, says that geoengineering, or engineering the climate on a global scale, is an imperfect science. "It cannot offset the risks that come from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If we don't halt man-made CO2 emissions, no amount of climate engineering can eliminate the problems – massive emissions reductions are still necessary."
  • Keith suggests two novel geoengineering approaches–'levitating' engineered nano-particles, and the airborne release of sulphuric acid
  • In his study–published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a top-ranked international science journal–Keith describes a new class of engineered nano-particles that might be used to offset global warming more efficiently, and with fewer negative side effects, than using sulphates.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Keith stresses that whether geoengineering technology is ever used, it shouldn't be seen as a reason not to reduce man-made greenhouse gas emissions now accumulating in the atmosphere. "Seat belts reduce the risk of being injured in accidents. But having a seat belt doesn't mean you should drive drunk at 100 miles an hour," he says.
  • anonymous on 08 Sep 10
     
    "There may be better ways to engineer the planet's climate to prevent dangerous global warming than mimicking volcanoes, a University of Calgary climate scientist says in two new studies." At Lab Spaces on September 7, 2010.
anonymous

Gladwell Misses the Vesica Piscis - 0 views

www.theimaginationage.net/...well-misses-vesica-piscis.html

technology

shared by anonymous on 28 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Gladwell's argument centers on the binary perception that in stark contrast to the civil war era, the youth of today seem quite content with banal exchanges, but just because he doesn't personally know any revolutionaries doesn't mean they don't exist and it also doesn't mean that they aren't using the Internet in ways that perhaps Gladwell himself can't imagine. It comes as no surprise therefore that he cites Evgeny Morozov (whose work I critiqued in Policy Innovations).
  • anonymous on 28 Sep 10
     
    A response to Malcolm Gladwell's recent New Yorker piece. "What Gladwell misses is the vesica piscis: the area of intersection between two overlapping circles or ideas." By Rita J. King at The Imagination Age on September 27, 2010.
anonymous

Twitter, Facebook, and Social Activism - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...101004fa_fact_gladwell

social technology media politics

shared by anonymous on 27 Sep 10 - Cached
  • he kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties.
  • There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.
  • But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.
  • “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.
  • This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization.
  • There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars.
  • No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals.
  • Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.
  • The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.
  • Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger
  • It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.
  • anonymous on 27 Sep 10
     
    Why the revolution will not be tweeted. "There are many things, though, that networks don't do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don't have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals." By Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker on October 4, 2010.
anonymous

Socratic Electronics - 0 views

www.openbookproject.net/...socratic

education technology

shared by anonymous on 01 Oct 10 - Cached
  • The most important thing any educator can impart to a student, in any context, is the ability to teach themselves. When teachers dispense knowledge to students in the traditional lecture format -- where students passively watch and listen -- they deny students deep interaction with the subject matter. Furthermore, instructor-centered pedagogy assumes and reinforces the debilitating notion that education can only happen in the presence of a superior: You (the student) need me (the teacher) in order to learn.
  • anonymous on 01 Oct 10
     
    "What is Socratic Electronics? We live in a world where the accumulation of knowledge is exponential over time, and where the ability to continuously learn and make sound judgments is essential to survival. Formal education ought to play an important role in preparing individuals to succeed in this environment, but many traditional modes of education actually discourage development of independent thinking skills necessary for success."
anonymous

U.S. Midterm Elections, Obama and Iran - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s_midterm_elections_obama_iran

politics

shared by anonymous on 26 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Obama now has two options in terms of domestic strategy.
  • The first is to continue to press his agenda, knowing that it will be voted down.
  • The second option is to abandon his agenda, cooperate with the Republicans and re-establish his image as a centrist.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Obama also has a third option, which is to shift his focus from domestic policy to foreign policy.
  • There are two problems with Obama becoming a foreign policy president.
  • The first is that the country is focused on the economy and on domestic issues.
  • The second problem is that his presidency and campaign have been based on the general principle of accommodation rather than confrontation in foreign affairs
  • There are many actions that would satisfy Obama’s accomodationist inclinations, but those would not serve well in portraying him as decisive in foreign policy.
  • This leaves the obvious choice: Iran.
  • So far, Obama’s policy toward Iran has been to incrementally increase sanctions by building a weak coalition and allow the sanctions to create shifts in Iran’s domestic political situation. The idea is to weaken President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and strengthen his enemies, who are assumed to be more moderate and less inclined to pursue nuclear weapons. Obama has avoided overt military action against Iran, so a confrontation with Iran would require a deliberate shift in the U.S. stance, which would require a justification.
  • The most obvious justification would be to claim that Iran is about to construct a nuclear device. Whether or not this is true would be immaterial.
  • First, no one would be in a position to challenge the claim, and, second, Obama’s credibility in making the assertion would be much greater than George W. Bush’s, given that Obama does not have the 2003 weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle to deal with and has the advantage of not having made such a claim before.
  • Defining what it means to almost possess nuclear weapons is nearly a metaphysical discussion. It requires merely a shift in definitions and assumptions. This is cynical scenario, but it can be aligned with reasonable concerns.
  • As STRATFOR has argued in the past, destroying Iran’s nuclear capability does not involve a one-day raid, nor is Iran without the ability to retaliate. Its nuclear facilities are in a number of places and Iran has had years to harden those facilities. Destroying the facilities might take an extended air campaign and might even require the use of special operations units to verify battle damage and complete the mission. In addition, military action against Iran’s naval forces would be needed to protect the oil routes through the Persian Gulf from small boat swarms and mines, anti-ship missile launchers would have to be attacked and Iranian air force and air defenses taken out. This would not solve the problem of the rest of Iran’s conventional forces, which would represent a threat to the region, so these forces would have to be attacked and reduced as well.
  • An attack on Iran would not be an invasion, nor would it be a short war. Like Yugoslavia in 1999, it would be an extended air war lasting an unknown number of months.
  • It would be a war based on American strengths in aerial warfare and technology, not on American weaknesses in counterinsurgency.
  • It would strengthen the Iranian regime (as aerial bombing usually does) by rallying the Iranian public to its side against the aggression. If the campaign were successful, the Iranian regime would be stronger politically, at least for a while, but eviscerated militarily.
  • A campaign against Iran would have its risks.
  • Iran could launch a terrorist campaign and attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz
  • We have argued that a negotiation with Iran in the order of President Richard Nixon’s reversal on China would be a lower-risk solution to the nuclear problem than the military option. But for Obama, this is politically difficult to do. Had Bush done this, he would have had the ideological credentials to deal with Iran, as Nixon had the ideological credentials to deal with China. But Obama does not. Negotiating an agreement with Iran in the wake of an electoral rout would open the floodgates to condemnation of Obama as an appeaser. In losing power, he loses the option for negotiation unless he is content to be a one-term president.
  • I am arguing the following.
  • First, Obama will be paralyzed on domestic policies by this election. He can craft a re-election campaign blaming the Republicans for gridlock.
  • The other option for Obama is to look for triumph in foreign policy where he has a weak hand.
  • I am not claiming that Obama will decide to do this based on politics, although no U.S. president has ever engaged in foreign involvement without political considerations, nor should he. I am saying that, at this moment in history, given the domestic gridlock that appears to be in the offing, a shift to a foreign policy emphasis makes sense, Obama needs to be seen as an effective commander in chief and Iran is the logical target.
  • This is not a prediction. Obama does not share his thoughts with me. It is merely speculation on the options Obama will have after the midterm elections, not what he will choose to do.
  • anonymous on 26 Oct 10
     
    "We are a week away from the 2010 U.S. midterm elections. The outcome is already locked in. Whether the Republicans take the House or the Senate is close to immaterial. It is almost certain that the dynamics of American domestic politics will change. The Democrats will lose their ability to impose cloture in the Senate and thereby shut off debate. Whether they lose the House or not, the Democrats will lose the ability to pass legislation at the will of the House Democratic leadership. The large majority held by the Democrats will be gone, and party discipline will not be strong enough (it never is) to prevent some defections. " By George Friedman at StratFor on October 26, 2010.
anonymous

Why I spoofed science journalism, and how to fix it - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...science-journalism-spoof

layscience

shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The formula I outlined – using a few randomly picked BBC science articles as a guide – isn't necessarily an example of bad journalism; butscience reporting is predictable enough that you can write a formula for it that everyone recognises, and once the formula has been seen it's very hard to un-see, like a faint watermark at the edge of your vision.
  • A science journalist should be capable of, at a minimum, reading a scientific paper and being able to venture a decent opinion.
  • If you are not actually providing any analysis, if you're not effectively 'taking a side', then you are just a messenger, a middleman, a megaphone with ears. If that's your idea of journalism, then my RSS reader is a journalist.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • thanks to the BBC's multi-platform publishing guidelines, the first few paragraphs of any news story need to be written in such a way that they can be cut and pasted into a Ceefax page.
  • Another issue affecting style is the need to reach a diverse audience. This puts pressure on commercial media groups who need to secure page views to generate advertising revenue
  • As a writer, word limits are both a blessing and a curse. Many bloggers would have their writing immeasurably improved if they stuck to a word limit – doing that forces you to plan, to organise your thoughts, and to avoid redundancy and repetition. On the other hand, some stories need more time to tell, and sticking dogmatically to an arbitrary 800-word limit for stuff that's published on the internet doesn't make a lot of sense. The internet is not running out of space.
  • Science is all about process, context and community, but reporting concentrates on single people, projects and events.
  • Hundreds of interesting things happen in science every week, and yet journalists from all over the media seem driven by a herd mentality that ensures only a handful of stories are covered. And they're not even the most interesting stories in many cases.
  • Members of the public could be forgiven for believing that science involves occasional discoveries interspersed with long periods of 'not very much happening right now'. The reality of science is almost the complete opposite of this.
  • One of the biggest failures of science reporting is the media's belief that a scientific paper or research finding represents a conclusion of some kind. Scientists know that this simply isn't true. A new paper is the start or continuance of a discussion or debate that will often rumble on for years or even decades.
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    What's wrong with science journalism, and how do we fix it? By Martin Robbins at The Guardian on October 5, 2010.
anonymous

New Statesman - Facebook, capitalism and geek entitlement - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...social-facebook-geek-women

economics society technology

shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - Cached
  • The film's basic formula is the familiar blogs-to-bling-and-bitches redemptive parable of male geek culture, with the added bonus that it happens to be based on real events. The protagonist, Facebook's co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, is a brilliant 19-year-old coder. His painful social ineptitude, as told here, gets him savagely dumped by his girlfriend, after which, drunk and misunderstood, he sets up a website to rate the physical attractiveness of the women undergraduates of Harvard, thus exacting his revenge upon the female sex that has so cruelly spurned his obvious genius.
  • The Social Network is an expertly crafted and exhaustively modern film, and one of its more pertinent flashpoints is the reminder that a resource that redefined the human interactions of 500 million people across the globe was germinated in an act of vengeful misogyny.
  • This is no reflection on the personal moral compass of Sorkin, who is no misogynist, but who understands that in rarefied American circles of power and privilege, women are still stage-hands, and objectification is hard currency.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This is what Facebook is about, and ultimately what capitalist realism is about: life as reducible to one giant hot-or-not contest, with adverts.
  • There is a certain type of nerd entitlement that is all too easily co-opted into a modern mythology of ruthless capitalist exploitation, in which the acquisition of wealth and status at all costs is phrased as a cheeky way of getting one's own back on those kids who were mean to you at school.
  • The protagonist is invariably white and rich and always male -- Hollywood cannot countenance female nerds, other than as minor characters who transform into pliant sexbots as soon as they remove their glasses -- but these privileges are as naught compared to the injustice life has served him by making him shy, spotty and interested in Star Trek. He has been wronged, and he has every right to use his l33t skills to bend the engine of humanity to his purpose.
  • For me, being a geek is about community, energy and celebration of difference -- but in the sterile fairytale of contemporary capitalism, successful geekery is about the rewards of power and the usefulness of commodifying other humans as a sum of likes, interests and saleable personal data.
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    "The Social Network is an elegant psychodrama of contemporary economics. " By Laurie Penny at New Statesman on October 1, 2010. Referred to by Nicholas Schiller.
anonymous

Turn on, Start Up, Drop Out - 0 views

www.slate.com/2271265

technology society

shared by anonymous on 21 Oct 10 - Cached
  • To describe Peter Thiel as simply a libertarian wildly understates the case. His belief system is based on unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism. His most famous quote—borrowed from Vince Lombardi—is, "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser." In a personal statement produced last year for the Cato Institute*, Thiel announced: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The public, he says, doesn't support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn't support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," he writes.
  • What differentiates Thiel's Silicon Valley style of philanthropic libertarianism from Glenn Beck's screaming-raving-weeping variety is a laissez-faire attitude toward personal behavior and the lack of any demagogic instinct. Thiel, who is openly gay, wants to flee the mob, not rally it through gold-hoarding or flag-waving.
  • anonymous on 21 Oct 10
     
    "Hyper-libertarian Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel's appalling plan to pay students to quit college." By Jacob Weisberg at Slate on October 16, 2010.
anonymous

2010 Isn't What Many Futurists Of The Past Imagined - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

futurism retro technology

shared by anonymous on 25 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 25 Oct 10
     
    "The late visionary Arthur C. Clarke was a master of predictive fiction. In Clarke's 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey - which he co-wrote with director Stanley Kubrick - we get a taste of the vast influence that computers will have in our lives over the coming decades. The 1984 movie sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, was about - among other things - humans making contact with alien life. The year he chose for this breakthrough: 2010. Well, here we are. It's 2010 and no word from a Jovian moon yet. But it's only October." By Linton Weeks at NPR on October 18, 2010.
anonymous

Bacteria 'R' Us - 0 views

www.miller-mccune.com/...bacteria-r-us-23628

layscience ecology

shared by anonymous on 25 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Regardless of the scale at which we explore the biosphere — whether we delve into the global ocean or the internal seas of individual organisms — bacteria are now known to be larger players than humans ever imagined.
  • Strictly by the numbers, the vast majority — estimated by many scientists at 90 percent — of the cells in what you think of as your body are actually bacteria, not human cells.
  • The number of bacterial species in the human gut is estimated to be about 40,000, according to Daniel Frank and Norman Pace, writing in the January 2008 Current Opinion in Gastroenterology. The total number of individual bacterial cells in the gut is projected to be on the order of 100 trillion, according to Xing Yang and colleagues at the Shanghai Center for Bioinformation Technology, reporting in the June 2009 issue of PLoS One, a peer-reviewed online science journal. Xing calculated a ballpark figure for the number of unique bacterial genes in a human gut at about 9 million.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • These facts by themselves may trigger existential shock: People are partly made of pond scum.
  • For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on the fundamental difference between two major types of life-forms: those that have a cell wall but few or no internal subdivisions, and those that possess cells containing a nucleus, mitochondria, chloroplasts and other smaller substructures, or organelles.
  • The former life-forms — often termed prokaryotes — include bacteria and the most ancient of Earth’s life-forms, the archaea.
  • The tree-of-life notion remains a reasonable fit for the eukaryotes, but emerging knowledge about bacteria suggests that the micro-biosphere is much more like a web, with information of all kinds, including genes, traveling in all directions simultaneously.
  • In principle, every bacterium can exchange genes with every other bacterium on the planet. A side effect of this reality: The notion of separate bacterial species is somewhat shaky, although the term is still in use for lack of a better alternative.
  • Even before quorum sensing was discovered in V. fischeri, scientists had noted many examples of coordinated action, such as “swarming,” in which a colony of bacteria moves as a unit across a surface, and the development of “fruiting bodies,” in which bacteria glom together to form inert spores as a means of surviving severe environmental conditions.
  • Bacteria can live solitary lives, of course, but they prefer to aggregate in biofilms, also known as “slime cities.” Biofilms usually form on a surface, whether it’s the inner lining of the intestines or inside water pipes or on your teeth. In these close-knit colonies, bacteria coordinate group production of a slimy translucent coating and fibers called “curli” and “pili” that attach the colony to something else. Biofilms can harbor multiple types of bacteria as well as fungi and protists (microscopic eukaryotes). A complex vascular system for transporting nutrients and chemical signals through a biofilm may also develop. As Tim Friend described in his book The Third Domain, explorers diving to the wreck of the Titanic found these features in “rusticles” — draped colonies of microbes — feeding on the iron in the Titanic‘s hull and skeleton, more than 2 miles under the surface.
  • The import of this distribution of microorganisms is unclear, but its existence reinforces the notion that humans should start thinking of themselves as ecosystems, rather than discrete individuals.
  • A microbe’s effects on the human body can depend on conditions. And if you approach the human body as an ecosystem, some researchers are finding, it may be possible to tune that system and prevent many diseases — from acute infections to chronic debilitating conditions — and even to foster mental health, through bacteria.
  • in practice, the medical notion of friendly microbes has yet to extend much past the idea that eating yogurt is good for you. For most doctors and medical microbiologists, microbes are enemies in a permanent war. Medicine certainly has good reason to view microbes as dangerous, since the germ theory of disease and the subsequent development of antibiotics are two of medical science’s greatest accomplishments.
  • When threatened, bacteria become defensive, often producing toxins that make the host even sicker. They also tend to speed up their acquisition of and purging of genes when under external selection pressure, of which antibiotics are an obvious and powerful example.
  • Gut bacteria play a role in obesity, which affects about a third of American adults.
  • Research in animals supports the idea that gut bacteria play a role in weight regulation.
  • bacteria produce some of the same types of neurotransmitters that regulate the function of the human brain.
  • it’s been known for a while that sick people get depressed and anxious. This seems so obvious as to be a no-brainer, but research suggests that some of the fear and fatigue associated with infections stems from immune responses affecting the brain.
  • As it turns out, however, very few bacteria can be grown in the relatively austere conditions of laboratories. In fact, only about 0.1 percent of all bacteria are currently culturable. Many bacteria don’t do well in monoculture, preferring to live in mixed communities of microorganisms. Those living in extreme temperatures and pressures require very specialized equipment to grow in a typical lab.
  • In fact, they wrote, the genes that enable these processes today “may have been distributed across a common global gene pool, before cellular differentiation and vertical genetic transmission evolved as we know it today.”
  • In other words, bacteria are supreme code monkeys that probably perfected the packages of genes and the regulation necessary to produce just about every form of life, trading genetic information among themselves long before there was anything resembling a eukaryotic cell, let alone the masters of the universe that humans believe humans to be.
  • Giovannoni stops short of claiming that bacteria are actually thinking. But the litany of bacterial talents does nibble at conventional assumptions about thinking: Bacteria can distinguish “self” from “other,” and between their relatives and strangers; they can sense how big a space they’re in; they can move as a unit; they can produce a wide variety of signaling compounds, including at least one human neurotransmitter; they can also engage in numerous mutually beneficial relationships with their host’s cells. Even more impressive, some bacteria, such as Myxococcus xanthus, practice predation in packs, swarming as a group over prey microbes such as E. coli and dissolving their cell walls.
  • These phenomena, Herbert Levine’s group argues, reveal a capacity for language long considered unique to humans.
  • That bacteria-centric argument is, of course, a hazy, metaphysical Gaian fantasy worthy of Avatar. In a more down-to-earth assessment, it is clear that bacteria are not what the general run of humans thought they were, and neither are humans.
  • The grand story of human exceptionalism — the idea that humans are separate from and superior to everything else in the biosphere — has taken a terminal blow from the new knowledge about bacteria. Whether humanity decides to sanctify them in some way or merely admire them and learn what they’re really doing, there’s no going back.
  • anonymous on 25 Oct 10
     
    "Emerging research shows that bacteria have powers to engineer the environment, to communicate and to affect human well-being. They may even think." By Valerie Brown at Miller-McCune on October 18, 2010.
anonymous

Supercomputers 'will fit in a sugar cube,' IBM says - 0 views

www.kurzweilai.net/l-fit-in-a-sugar-cube-ibm-says

technology

shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "A pioneering research effort could shrink the world's most powerful supercomputer processors to the size of a sugar cube, IBM scientists say. The approach will see many computer processors stacked on top of one another, cooling them with water flowing between each one." At Kurzweil, but by BBC News on November 12, 2010.
anonymous

A Lost Generation - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...a-lost-generation

america election

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 10 - Cached
  • This economic downturn structurally resembles the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s rather than the cyclical recessions that have recurred since World War II. The American people, mired in debt, with one in six lacking full-time employment, are not spending; and businesses, uncertain of demand for their products, are not investing no matter how low interest rates fall. With the Fed virtually powerless, the only way to stimulate private demand and investment is through public spending. Obama tried to do this with his initial stimulus program, but it was watered down by tax cuts, and undermined by decreases in state spending. By this summer, its effect had dissipated.
  • Many voters have concluded that Obama’s stimulus program actually contributed to the rise in unemployment and that cutting public spending will speed a recovery. It’s complete nonsense, as the experience of the United States in 1937 or of Japan in the 1990s demonstrated, but it will guide Republican thinking in Congress, and prevent Obama and the Democrats from passing a new stimulus program.
  • as the Obama administration recognized, much of the new demand will focus on the development of renewable energy and green technology. As the Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans understand, these kinds of industries require government coordination and subsidies. But the new generation of Republicans rejects this kind of industrial policy. They even oppose Obama’s obviously successful auto bailout.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Obama has to share some of the blame. Structural crises like the Civil War or the two Great Depressions present presidents with formidable challenges, but also great opportunities. If they fail, they discredit themselves and their party, as Hoover did after 1929; but if they succeed, as McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt did after 1896 or Franklin Roosevelt did after 1932, they not only help the country, but also create enduring majorities for their party.
  • According to exit polls, 53 percent of voters in House races had an unfavorable view of the Republican Party and only 41 percent had a favorable view. I found this myself in interviewing suburban Philadelphia voters last weekend. Even those who said they were Republicans had grave doubts about what the party stood for and regarded the Tea Partiers as “wackos.”
  • In 2001, Karl Rove believed that George W. Bush had created a new McKinley majority that would endure for decades; and when Obama was elected, many Democrats, including me, thought that he had a chance to create a Roosevelt-like Democratic majority. But instead, like Japan, we’ve had a succession of false dawns, or what Walter Dean Burnham once called an “unstable equilibrium.”
  • anonymous on 03 Nov 10
     
    "Republicans might say it's the re-emergence of a conservative Republican majority, but that's not really what happened. What this election suggests to me is that the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced. The U.S emerged from the Civil War, the depression of the 1890s, World War I, and the Great Depression and World War II stronger than ever-with a more buoyant economy and greater international standing. A large part of the reason was the political system's ability to provide the leadership the country needed. But what this election suggests to me is that this may no longer be the case." By John B. Ludis at The New Republic on November 3, 2010.
anonymous

Geopolitical Journey, Part 2: Borderlands - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...cal_journey_part_2_borderlands

geopolitics europe fsu

shared by anonymous on 17 Nov 10 - Cached
  • A borderland is a region where history is constant: Everything is in flux.
  • The countries we are visiting on this trip (Turkey, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland) occupy the borderland between Islam, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity.
  • My interest in the region is to understand more clearly how the next iteration of regional geopolitics will play out. Russia is far more powerful than it was 10 years ago. The European Union is undergoing internal stress and Germany is recalculating its position. The United States is playing an uncertain and complex game. I want to understand how the semicircle of powers, from Turkey to Poland, are thinking about and positioning themselves for the next iteration of the regional game.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • I have been accused of thinking like an old Cold warrior. I don’t think that’s true. The Soviet Union has collapsed, and U.S. influence in Europe has declined. Whatever will come next will not be the Cold War. What I do not expect this to be is a region of perpetual peace. It has never been that before. It will not be that in the future. I want to understand the pattern of conflict that will occur in the future. But for that we need to begin in the past, not with the Cold War, but with World War I.
  • he Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, the Russian empire was replaced by the Soviet Union, and the German empire was overthrown and replaced by a republic.
  • The Carpathian Mountains form a rough boundary between the Russians and the rest of Europe from Slovakia to the south.
  • The northern part of Europe is dominated by a vast plain stretching from France to Moscow.
  • Following World War I, Poland re-emerged as a sovereign nation.
  • Pilsudski is an interesting figure
  • The Russians defeated the Ukrainians and turned on Poland. Pilsudski defeated them.
  • It is interesting to speculate about history if Pilsudski had lost Warsaw. The North European Plain was wide open, and the Soviets could have moved into Germany. Undoubtedly, the French would have moved to block them, but there was a powerful Communist Party in France that had little stomach for war. It could have played out many different ways had Pilsudski not stopped the Russians. But he did.
  • His vision was something called the Intermarium — an alliance of the nations between the seas built around Poland and including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Finland and the Baltic states.
  • Pilsudski’s Intermarium makes a kind of logical if not historical sense. It is not historical because this borderland has always been the battleground for others. It has never formed together to determine its fate.
  • As always, the Intermarium is caught between Russia and Europe.
  • the entire question of the price and value of the European Union became a central issue in Germany.
  • Germany has not thought of itself as a freestanding power since 1945. It is beginning to think that way again, and that could change everything, depending on where it goes.
  • For Poland, the specter of a German-Russian entente is a historical nightmare. The last time this happened, in 1939, Poland was torn apart and lost its sovereignty for 50 years.
  • geopolitics teaches that subjective inclinations do not erase historical patterns.
  • The question in Ukraine is whether their attempt to achieve complete independence is over, to be replaced by some informal but iron bond to Russia
  • There is no more important question in Europe at the moment than the future of Ukraine.
  • The area east of the Dniester, Transdniestria, promptly seceded from Moldova
  • Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. Its primary export is wine, sent mostly to Russia. The Russians have taken to blocking the export of wine for “health reasons.” I think the health issue is geopolitical and not biological.
  • Romania is oriented toward the European Union but is one of the many countries in the union that may not really belong there.
  • as its power increases in the Balkans, Turkey will be one of the forces that countries like Romania will have to face.
  • Russia as seen through the eyes of its neighbors is the purpose of this trip, and that’s the conversation I will want to have.
  • It is a theory that argues that the post-Cold War world is ending. Russia is re-emerging in a historically recognizable form. Germany is just beginning the process of redefining itself in Europe, and the EU’s weaknesses have become manifest. Turkey has already taken the first steps toward becoming a regional power. We are at the beginning of a period in which these forces play themselves out.
  • I am going to the region with an analytic framework, a theory that I will want to test.
  • Those who argue that the Turkish government is radically Islamist are simply wrong, for two reasons.
  • First, Turkey is deeply divided
  • Second, the Islamism of the Turkish government cannot possibly be compared to that of Saudi Arabia
  • The single greatest American fear should not be China or al Qaeda. It is the amalgamation of the European Peninsula’s technology with Russia’s natural resources. That would create a power that could challenge American primacy.
  • This is not a time of clear strategic thinking in Washington. I find it irritating to go there, since they regard my views as alarmist and extreme while I find their views outmoded and simplistic.
  • The United States is a vast nation, and Washington thinks of itself as its center, but it really isn’t. The United States doesn’t have a center. The pressures of the world and the public shape its actions, albeit reluctantly.
  • I regard NATO as a bureaucracy overseeing an alliance whose mission was accomplished 20 years ago.
  • The Intermarium countries remain infatuated with the European Union and NATO, but the infatuation is declining. The year 2008 and Germany’s indifference to these countries was not pleasant, and they are learning that NATO is history.
  • Washington still thinks of Russia as the failed state of the 1990s. It simply doesn’t take it seriously. It thinks of the European Union as having gone over a speed bump from which it will recover. But mostly, Washington thinks about Afghanistan. For completely understandable reasons, Afghanistan sucks up the bandwidth of Washington, allowing the rest of the world to maneuver as it wishes.
  • Nothing, of course, could be further from Washington’s mind.
  • I am not making strategy but examining geopolitical forces. I am not planning what should be but thinking about what will likely happen.
  • anonymous on 17 Nov 10
     
    "This is the second installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States. "
anonymous

The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother - 0 views

www.thestar.com/...on-high-security-little-bother

security

shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away. Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.
  • That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.
  • In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies. "There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "We have a saying in Hebrew that it's much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it's dark over there. That's exactly how (North American airport security officials) act," Sela said. "You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification. That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience. "It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He's worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world." By Cathal Kelly at thestar.com on December 30, 2009.
anonymous

Paleo-Future - Paleo-Future Blog - Driverless Car of the Future (1957) - 0 views

www.paleofuture.com/...ss-car-of-the-future-1957.html

technology predictions

shared by anonymous on 10 Dec 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Dec 10
     
    "TVs that hang on walls? Automatic lights? Food cooked in seconds? American power companies sure had the future figured out! Except for one little thing... we're still waiting on those driverless cars. The futuristic family from this ad bares a striking resemblance to the family of Disneyland TV's 1958 episode, "Magic Highway, USA." ELECTRICITY MAY BE THE DRIVER. One day your car may speed along an electric super-highway, its speed and steering automatically controlled by electronic devices embedded in the road. Highways will be made safe -- by electricity! No traffic jam.. no collisions... no driver fatigue."
« First ‹ Previous 141 - 160 of 199 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page