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thinkahol *

YouTube - NEW PROOF 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB! Richard Gage. Architects and Engineers for ... - 0 views

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    Richard Gage, member of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, is interviewed on KMPH Fox 26 in Fresno, California, about the events of September 11, 2001. He has been an architect for over twenty years, and is experienced in steel structures. He, as well as 700 other architects and engineers, calls for a more thorough investigation into the collapses of the World Trade Center Buildings. Topics discussed: Proof of thermite and nano-thermite (explosives) found in WTC dust.All three of the World Trade Center Buildings were brought down by controlled demolition.Building 7s collapse at freefall speed into its own footprint.Fires had never brought down a steel structure before 9/11, and have never brought down one since.Several tons of molten iron at the base of the buildings.Al Qaeda was not responsible for the collapses.Much more! Watch and spread this video!
thinkahol *

GRITtv » Blog Archive » Michelle Alexander: End The Drug War: Face the New Ji... - 0 views

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    The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs.  The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap's become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old "War on Drugs" public enemy number one for the nation's oldest civil rights organization? Well here's why:  it's not extraneous - it's central: the war on drugs is the engine of 21st century discrimination - an engine that has brought Jim Crow into the age of Barack Obama.     Author Michelle Alexander lays out the statistics -- and the stories --  of 21st Century Jim Crow in her ought-to-blow-your-socks off book: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness." I had a chance to sit down with Alexander earlier this summer. We'll be posting the full interview in two parts.     "We have managed decades after the civil rights movement to create something like a caste system in the United States," says Alexander in part one here  "In major urban areas, the majority of African American men are either behind bars, under correctional control or saddled with criminal record and once branded as criminal or a felon, they're trapped for life in 2nd class status."     It's not just about people having a hard time getting ahead and climbing the ladder of success. It's about a rigged system. Sound familiar?  Like the Pew Research Center report on household wealth and the Great Recession -- the NAACP resolution story was a one-day news-blip - despite the fact that it pierces the by-your-bootstraps myth that is at the heart of - you pick it - the deficit, the stimulus, the tax code - every contemporary US economic debate.     White America just maybe ought to pay attention. With more and more Americans falling out of jobs and into debt, criminal records are a whole lot easier to come by than life-sustaining employment.  Contrary to the conventional media version, the "Drug War" story is not a people with problems
thinkahol *

Evolution machine: Genetic engineering on fast forward - life - 27 June 2011 - New Scie... - 0 views

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    Automated genetic tinkering is just the start - this machine could be used to rewrite the language of life and create new species of humans
thinkahol *

Why Big Media Is Going Nuclear Against The DMCA | TechCrunch - 0 views

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    When Congress updated copyright laws and passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, it ushered an era of investment, innovation and job creation.  In the decade since, companies like Google, YouTube and Twitter have emerged thanks to the Act, but in the process, they have disrupted the business models and revenue streams of traditional media companies (TMCs).  Today, the TMCs are trying to fast-track a couple of bills in the House and Congress to reverse all of that. Through their lobbyists in Washington, D.C., media companies are trying to rewrite the DMCA through two new bills.  The content industry's lobbyists have forged ahead without any input from the technology industry, the one in the Senate is called Protect IP and the one in the House is called E-Parasites.  The E-Parasite law would kill the safe harbors of the DMCA and allow traditional media companies to attack emerging technology companies by cutting off their ability to transact and collect revenue, sort of what happened to Wikileaks, if you will.  This would scare VCs from investing in such tech firms, which in turn would destroy job creation. The technology industry is understandably alarmed by its implications, which include automatic blacklists for any site issued a takedown notice by copyright holders that would extend to payment providers and even search engines.   What is going on and how exactly did we get here?
thinkahol *

Divine Inspiration From the Masses - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

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    Open-source programming's organizing principle has been embraced in medical research, engineering -- even religion
thinkahol *

Anarchist, Community Organizer and Writer Scott Crow on Rag Radio | ZGraphix on blip.tv - 0 views

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    Scott Crow is an Austin-based anarchist community organizer, political activist, and writer. His grassroots organizing projects include the post-Katrina Common Ground Collective in New Orleans, which has been called the largest anarchist-influenced organization in modern U.S. history. Scott has worked with groups like Greenpeace, ACORN, and the Rainforest Action Network, and currently works at an anarchist recycling center cooperative in Austin. Scott's political activities have led the FBI to label him a "domestic terrorist," and earlier this year he was featured in a front page article in The New York Times about FBI surveillance of political activists. Scott's book, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective, will be published by PM Press in September, 2011. Rag Radio is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog (http://theragblog.blogspot.com) and the New Journalism Project. Host and producer: Thorne Dreyer; Engineer and Co-Producer: Tracey Schulz. Video produced for Austin Indymedia by Jeff Zavala. A ZGraphix video production. http://zgraphix.org http://austin.indymedia.org
Johann Höchtl

Geo2Gov Mashup interview « Communica - 0 views

  • The simple summary is that geo2gov is a spatial search engine. The longer version is that geo2gov takes a location in a variety of different formats (address, postcode, suburb, place name, ip address, etc) and converts them to a GPS location, then drills that point through half a dozen spatial layers to identify federal, state, local and ward level locations, as well as your statistical location within the most recent census.
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    Winner of MashupAustralia Hackfest Geo2Gov
Johann Höchtl

Wiki:Government 2.0 | Social Media CoLab - 0 views

  • Internal (intra or inter-government) collaboration. Institutional presence on external social networks Open government data Employees on external social networks 
  • Increased government efficiency Increased government accountability Increased citizen engagement and participation Increased innovation
  • Potential loss of privacy Invalid data
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 1) what data should the government share and 2) how does data influence the public sphere
  • The optimists decry the modern instantiations of bureaucracy and policy in which democratic governments operate as the source of democratic ills and support the normative idea of an informed and engaged public.  Pessimists counter that the normative model of democracy most accepted in the literature is a novel construction that is not grounded in the natural behavior of citizens.
  • The innocence of Americans is either explained as a rational choice under the principle of rational ignorance (Downs, 1957) or explained as something inherent in the lack of mental sophistication in humans.
  • Government 2.0 attempts to correct the problems of information diffusion by assuming that people are simply unable or unwilling to find information in the offline world.  If the barriers to information acquisition are lowered then, the theory goes, people will be more likely to find, synthesize and use information in decision-making processes.
  • Feedback loops: Who will be active in these loops? How will the public respond? 
  • People usually think about explicit citizen participation, but some of the most pwrful Web 2.0 tools aren't about that: it's about ppl who are participating w/o knowing they are participating. Google is actually one of the great engines of harnessing participation, anyone who clicks on a link is participating, a link is a vote, meaning hidden in something they're doing already. Wikipedia isn't the only place where people are contributing.
  • The amount of data being shared/collected about people is growing exponentially, old notions of privacy need to be replaed by ideas of visibility and control: give more control over who gets to see it. We are better off with more visibility and control than stopping people from collecting data. The data is incredibly useful, applicaitons depend on data, people willingly giving up that privacy about where they are all the time.
  • many programs go wrong, generically, (what worries me) government is still very much an insider's game, we have not yet really built a system that allows real participation
  • Another gov 2.0 observation: it's very hard for a government agency to start over, it's not like private sector, where companies with bad ideas go out of business. Government agencies don't go out of business. (consumers benefit from newspapers going out of business) We don't have creative destruction in gov't, the basic machinery of it just gets bigger and more entrenched. Need to figure out how to start over: what not to do
  • The toughest part about Web 2.0, Gov 2.0, etc, might be the role of management. It used to be about defining the outcome and monitoring the progress towards that outcome. In Web 2.0 you don't know what that outcome is, it's a huge leap of faith, and takes a tremendous amount of adjusting to that approach. Do we need a different set of metrics? Yes. Media is intersecting with technology, technology is a new channel for media, even Hollywood is changing: oh my goodness, we have to create entirely new financial models!
  • "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." It's a cultural issue here, people are stuck in the past and we need a new wave of innovators or we should just expect slow results.
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