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Situating Occupy | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters
It only makes sense then that the World Revolution of 2011 should have begun as a rebellion against US client states, in much the same way as the rebellions that brought down Soviet power began in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia. The wave of rebellion soon spread across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Southern Europe, and then, much more uncertainly at first, across the Atlantic to New York. But once it had, in a matter of weeks it had exploded everywhere. At this point it’s extremely difficult to predict how far all this will ultimately go. Truly historical events, after all, consist of precisely those moments that could not have been predicted beforehand. Could we be in the presence of a fundamental shift like 1789 – a shift not only in global power relations but in our elementary political common sense? It’s impossible to say, but there are reasons to be optimistic.
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The Weekend Interview with David Gelernter: Rethinking the Digital Future – WSJ.com
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“Replication—The confirmation of results and conclusions from one study obtained independently in another—is considered the scientific gold standard. New tools and technologies, massive amounts of data, long-term studies, interdisciplinary approaches, and the complexity of the questions being asked are complicating replication efforts, as are increased pressures on scientists to advance their research. The five Perspectives in this section (and associated News and Careers stories, Readers’ Poll, and Editorial) explore some of the issues associated with replicating results across various fields. “
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Why Occupy? – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic
“Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa handled the eviction of Occupy LA with one thousand police officers. One thousand! There might have been less violence Tuesday night, but Occupy’s message (which was also Villaraigosa’s) still got sent: overwhelming force will be brought against political dissent. So, why occupy? The point is not to hold a city park. The point is to dramatize the struggle of weak against strong, which is also the struggle of poor against rich. If the dominant theme of the occupations is, as Jay Rosen succinctly put it, “public policy favors the rich,” then having the public police arrest the weak becomes a powerful metaphor for the message of the movement.”
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“Scientists in the field of social psychology must explore what they can do to prevent fraud in the future. Greater transparency with data, including depositing data in repositories where they can be accessed by other scientists (as is done in some other fields), might have sped up detection of this fraud, and it would certainly make researchers more careful about the analyses that they publish.”
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“Go to any social gathering in your neighborhood and you will notice that people interact mostly with others who are similar in terms of age, gender, race, attributes, and behaviors. This tendency of people to have similar friends—known as homophily—is one of the most pervasive features of social networks (1). A key question is how much of the homophily in behavior can be attributed to social diffusion, that is, direct causal influence of one person on another through social ties (2, 3). Results from two clever Internet experiments reported by Centola last year (4) and on page 1269 of this issue (5) shed light on how the particular arrangement of social ties promotes social diffusion.”
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Better Data for a Better Internet
“Decisions about when and how to regulate activities online will have a profound societal impact. Debates underlying such decisions touch upon fundamental problems related to economics, free expression, and privacy. Their outcomes will influence the structure of the Internet, how data can flow across it, and who will pay to build and maintain it. Most striking about these debates are the paucity of data available to guide policy and the extent to which policy-makers ignore the good data we do have.”
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World building 101 – Charlie’s Diary
“I propose that worldbuilding is the primary distinguishing characteristic of SF and fantasy (at least at a superficial level). Get the worldbuilding wrong, and your readers won’t be able to get a grip on the story line or the motivation of your characters. Or worse — they’ll get a grip, and realize that your story is, at best, a western or an age-of-sail yarn with the serial numbers filed off: that the trappings of the fantastic are only there to add a spurious sense of exoticism to an everyday tale. “
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The Performativity of Networks – Kieran Healy
“The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis in quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions; I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies.”
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Social Structures « Code and Culture
Comments on Social Structures by John Levi Martin.
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U.S. Intellectual History: Book Review: O’Connor on Kazin’s *American Dreamers*
“American Dreamers provides a welcome corrective to this tendency. Perfect for use with undergrads, it is a compact, readable overview of the history of the American left. Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement lies in imposing order on an otherwise unruly subject. Its seven chapters do not merely move forward in time, but instead concentrate on the movements that most clearly embodied leftist aspirations at a given moment. In successive chapters, Kazin explains, analyzes and criticizes abolitionism, suffragism, the trade union movement, Populism, socialism, communism and the New Left, concluding with the fragments of a contemporary left represented by such disparate figures as Naomi Klein, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky.”
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U.S. Intellectual History: Book Review: Hartman on Rodgers, *Age of Fracture*
“In addition to ambiguity, Age of Fracture exudes ambivalence, a moral position neither for nor against our age. Like the modernists, Rodgers sees no point pretending we can go back to the way it was. But like the antimodernists, Rodgers is unsettled by the present condition.”
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“R. W. White (1959) proposed that certain motives, such as curiosity, autonomy, and play (called intrinsic motives, or IMs), have common characteristics that distinguish them from drives. The evidence that mastery is common to IMs is anecdotal, not scientific. The assertion that “intrinsic enjoyment” is common to IMs exaggerates the significance of pleasure in human motivation and expresses the hedonistic fallacy of confusing consequence for cause. Nothing has been shown scientifically to be common to IMs that differentiates them from drives. An empirically testable theory of 16 basic desires is put forth based on psychometric research and subsequent behavior validation. The desires are largely unrelated to each other and may have different evolutionary histories. “
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The Wisdom of Motivated Crowds | FLOSSE Posse
“We must therefore find another criterion, which I think is the motivated crowds. People who work on Wikipedia … are not the indiscriminate crowd [but] are the part of the crowd who feels motivated to work with Wikipedia. Here it is: I’d replace the theory of the “wisdom of the crowd” with the theory of the “wisdom of the motivated crowds.” The general crowd says we should not pay taxes; the motivated crowd says that it’s fair to pay them. In fact, it’s not the ditch diggers or illiterates who contribute to Wikipedia, but people who already belong to a cultural crowd for the very fact they’re using a computer.”
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“Read & Trust is committed to gathering together the best independent writers available—the ones recommended by the writers you read and trust. “
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The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face | NeuroTribes
“Kare’s work gave the Mac a visual lexicon that was universally inviting and intuitive. Instead of thinking of each image as a tiny illustration of a real object, she aimed to design icons that were as instantly comprehensible as traffic signs.”
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Phil Yaffe thinks that the 7 percent rule is a pernicious myth. He debunks the notion that in an oral presentation, what you say is considerably less important than how you say it. He rejects the claim that content accounts for only 7 percent of the success of the presentation, while 93 percent of success is attributable to non-verbal factors, i.e. body language and vocal variety. The myth arises from a gross misinterpretation of a scientific experiment. It needs to be put to rest both for the benefit of presenters and the sake of scientific integrity.
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Keyboard Maestro 5.0.3: Work Faster with Macros for Mac OS X
Keyboard Maestro is a powerful macro program for Mac OS X Lion and Snow Leopard which has received glowing reviews.
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OpenScientist: Finalizing a Definition of “Citizen Science” and “Citizen Scientists”
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Landsat in Memory of the World Register : Image of the Day
What do the Gutenberg Bible, Tolstoy’s personal library, the Book of Kells—an 8th century illuminated manuscript, created by Celtic monks—and the Landsat Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) data archive have in common? They are all among the 245 international documentary collections that make up the Memory of the World Register. The register is a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) effort to preserve access to documentary heritage around the world.
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Encyclopedia – Custom | Economic History Services
“The EH.Net Encyclopedia of Economic and Business History is designed to provide students and laymen with high quality reference articles in the field. Articles for the Online Encyclopedia are written by experts, screened by a group of authorities, and carefully edited. A distinguished Advisory Board recommends entry topics, assists in the selection of authors, and defines the project’s scope.”
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It is well known that people movement exhibits a high degree of repetition since people visit regular places and make regular contacts for their daily activities. This paper1 presents a novel framework named Jyotish,2 which constructs a predictive model by exploiting the regularity of people movement found in the real joint Wifi/Bluetooth trace. The constructed model is able to answer three fundamental questions: (1) where the person will stay, (2) how long she will stay at the location, and (3) who she will meet. In order to construct the predictive model, Jyotish includes an efficient clustering algorithm to cluster Wifi access point information in the Wifi trace into locations. Then, we construct a Naive Bayesian classifier to assign these locations to records in the Bluetooth trace and obtain a fine granularity of people movement. Next, the fine grain movement trace is used to construct the predictive model including location predictor, stay duration predictor, and contact predictor to provide answers for three questions above. Finally, we evaluate the constructed predictive model over the real Wifi/Bluetooth trace collected by 50 participants in University of Illinois campus from March to August 2010. Evaluation results show that Jyotish successfully constructs a predictive model, which provides a considerably high prediction accuracy of people movement.
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The OSP Collection provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. Computational physics and computer modeling provide students with new ways to understand, describe, explain, and predict physical phenomena.
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The experimental effectiveness of mathematical proof
Link to PDF preprint.
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[1008.4831] Foundations of Inference
We present a foundation for inference that unites and significantly extends the approaches of Kolmogorov and Cox. Our approach is based on quantifying finite lattices of logical statements in a way that satisfies general lattice symmetries. With other applications in mind, our derivations assume minimal symmetries, relying on neither complementarity nor continuity or differentiability. Each relevant symmetry corresponds to an axiom of quantification, and these axioms are used to derive a unique set of rules governing quantification of the lattice. These rules form the familiar probability calculus. We also derive a unique quantification of divergence and information. Taken together these results form a simple and clear foundation for the quantification of inference.
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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The Umbrella Man – Video Library – The New York Times
“in historical research there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on…there’s this other level where everything is really weird.” Short doc by Erroll Morris on the “umbrella man” at the JFK assassination.
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Art and authenticity: The importance of originals in judgments of value. – PsycNET – Display Record
“Why are original artworks valued more than identical duplicates? The present studies explore 2 mechanisms underlying the special value of original artwork: the assessment of the art object as a unique creative act (performance) and the degree of physical contact with the original artist (contagion). Across 5 experiments, participants were exposed to hypothetical scenarios in which an original object was duplicated. The type of object varied across experiments (e.g., a painting vs. a piece of furniture) as did the circumstances surrounding the creation of the original object and the duplicate. Overall, the results support assessments of performance and contagion as key factors underlying the value of original artwork, and they are consistent with the conclusion that the discrepancy in value between original artworks and perfect duplicates derives from people’s lay theories about the domain of art, rather than from associations with particular kinds of art or certain cases of forgery.”
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danah boyd | apophenia » Debating Privacy in a Networked World for the WSJ
“I think that positioning privacy and public-ness in opposition is a false dichotomy. People want privacy *and* they want to be able to participate in public. This is why I think it’s important to emphasize that privacy is not about controlling information, but about having agency and the ability to control a social situation. People want to share and they gain a lot from sharing. But that’s different than saying that people want to be exposed by others. Agency matters. “
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Insights from Orthodox spirituality on technology | Faith and Technology
“My wondering was rewarded by this excerpt from Spiritual Instruction and Discourses, Vol I: The Authentic Seal by Archimandrite Aimilianos: “Orthodox Spirituality and the Technological Revolution” He argues that there isn’t anything essentially different about today’s technology, in its effect on our spiritual life, than there ever has been. Technology per se is not the problem. Rather it is the “absence of accountability in the way in which technology is administered and exploited.” “
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Daily Kos: Occupy poster art joins lineage of resistance messages
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Fairleigh Dickinson PublicMind Poll Shows Fox News Viewers Less Informed on Major News Stories
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The Moral Power of an Image: UC Davis Reactions – James Fallows – National – The Atlantic
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“This paper addresses the economic returns on tertiary degrees obtained in ages above 30 for individuals with upper-secondary schooling in light of current ideas on lifelong learning. Sweden is a case in point: Swedish tertiary education is open to older students, and labor market legislation supports employees who take a leave to study. The longitudinal data used for this analysis is based on annual population level registers from 1981 to 2007. Matching techniques are combined with fixed effect estimation to account for non-random selection. Late degrees were found to increase the employment rate by 18 percentage points and earnings while employed by 12 percent, which indicates strong employment effects and small effects on earnings while employed. The effects were absent in the higher parts of the earnings distribution, and females gained more than men. The estimated effects are largely stable across periods within a birth cohort.”
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Witnesses’ Recordings Help Investigators Explain Air Accidents – NYTimes.com
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Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.
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UC Davis Pepper-Spray Incident Reveals Weakness Up Top | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
How strong can anyone defending those causes be? These people are weak and pathetic, and they’re getting weaker. And boy, are they showing it. Way to gear up with combat helmets and the submachine guns, fellas, to take on a bunch of co-eds sitting Indian-style. Maybe after work you can go break up a game of Duck-Duck-Goose at the local Chuck E Cheese. I’d bring the APC for that one. Bravo to those kids who hung in there and took it. And bravo for standing up and showing everyone what real strength is. There is no strength without principle. You have it. They lost it. It’s as simple as that.
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Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Ms. Civil Society v. Mr. Unaccountable | TomDispatch
As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream. A year ago, no one imagined an Arab Spring, and no one imagined this American Fall — even the people who began planning for it this summer. We don’t know what’s coming next, and that’s the good news. My advice is just of the most general sort: Dream big. Occupy your hopes. Talk to strangers. Live in public. Don’t stop now. I’m sure of one thing: there are a lot more flowers coming.
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David Frum on the GOP’s Lost Sense of Reality — New York Magazine
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Debunking Economics: An Interview with Steve Keen – Part II « naked capitalism
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Dissent Magazine – Summer 2011 Issue – Iron Horse and Gilded …
One mystery haunts White throughout his book: how clever but not very talented men were able in nineteenth-century America to amass large fortunes and power even as their capitalist enterprises failed and engulfed large numbers of Americans in economic crisis. After reading White’s book, I am haunted by a different mystery: why the popular resistance that took shape during the First Gilded Age has been so absent from the Second. To the extent to which populist fury has surfaced in our own time, it is concentrated on the right, in the Tea Party and allied organizations. The disastrous 2010 BP oil spill generated no lasting anti-corporate sentiment, not even in Louisiana, once the dominion of “Share the Wealth” populist Huey Long. No new Debs or William Jennings Bryan has emerged even now, more than twenty-five years into this Gilded Age. The aversion of historians to reckoning with capitalism turns out to be the ruling idea of our age. No one, it seems, has escaped capitalism’s influence. Perhaps the labor stirrings in Wisconsin, and White’s remarkable attempt to resurrect the spirit of the First Gilded Age, are signs that something new is afoot.
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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The Protégé Ontology Editor and Knowledge Acquisition System
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‘Nudge’ policies are another name for coercion – opinion – 09 November 2011 – New Scientist
“All this suggests democratic arrangements, which foster diversity, are better at solving problems than technocratic ones. Libertarian paternalism is seductive because democratic politics is a cumbersome and messy business. Even so, democracy is far better than even the best-intentioned technocracy at discovering people’s real interests and how to advance them. It is also, obviously, better at defending those interests when bureaucrats do not mean well.”
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U.S. Intellectual History: the roots of “corporate personhood”
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The Early Days of a Better Nation – Where do you get your (Battle of) Ideas from?
“Mind arises within a social process, originally in the interaction of the infant and its care-givers, and subsequently broadening out to include the whole of society. You didn’t work out the Periodic Table, but you know it; likewise much else that’s in your head. Not many of us, after all, coin new words, at least not words that come into general use. In a sense, your conscious experience doesn’t belong to you, and that’s why consciousness seems ghostly and weird.”
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Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience
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Sasha Lilley, “On Neoliberalism: An Interview with David Harvey”
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Shock and Awe: one hundred years of bombing from above | openDemocracy
This week the London School of Economics, Goldsmiths, the Imperial War Museum, British Academy together with openDemocracy are launching a series of lectures, film shows, book launches and discussion to explore and commemorate the fact that one hundred years ago this November, the world was irrevocably and significantly altered. The development of aerial bombardment, initially over Libya by an Italian pilot, would create and routinise a new kind of warfare. The character of violent conflict was transformed along with the legal and moral systems that made it intelligible.
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PlugBug Charger – PlugBug Charger – Twelve South
“PlugBug is made exclusively for all MacBook Power Adapters, including current and previous models. Snap PlugBug onto your MacBook Power Adapter and you now have the first ever device that lets you charge your MacBook + iPad or iPhone simultaneously, from one wall outlet. “
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Elinor Ostrom Outlines Best Strategies for Managing the Commons | On the Commons
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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Why #OccupyWallStreet is Corporate America’s Final Warning – Forbes
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Matthew Brashears – Cornell University Sociology
“I am primarily interested in social networks and social psychology. How do our cognitive assets and limitations shape our social network structures? How does innovation emerge from conformity? I use a variety of experimental, quasi-experimental, and non-experimental methods to investigate these issues both with student populations and representative samples of larger groups. My research also addresses social isolation, the differences in network structures between males and females, and the amounts and types of resources that individuals can gain access to via their networks. “
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End Bonuses for Bankers – NYTimes.com
” Consider that we trust military and homeland security personnel with our lives, yet we don’t give them lavish bonuses. They get promotions and the honor of a job well done if they succeed, and the severe disincentive of shame if they fail. For bankers, it is the opposite: a bonus if they make short-term profits and a bailout if they go bust. The question of talent is a red herring: Having worked with both groups, I can tell you that military and security people are not only more careful about safety, but also have far greater technical skill, than bankers. “
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“This channel is a showcase for tangible interface projects made with the reacTIVision toolkit. reactivision.sourceforge.net”
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A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
“Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it’s the star player in every Vision Of The Future.”
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“reacTIVision is an open source, cross-platform computer vision framework for the fast and robust tracking of fiducial markers attached onto physical objects, as well as for multi-touch finger tracking. It was mainly designed as a toolkit for the rapid development of table-based tangible user interfaces (TUI) and multi-touch interactive surfaces. “
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International Society for Haptics: more information on Haptics
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Aging ‘Privacy’ Law Leaves Cloud E-Mail Open to Cops | Threat Level | Wired.com
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The movement is bigger than you thought | rachelsinha
“They are numerous and they are gaining confidence and pace. These are; Social Innovation incubators Movements for a specific solution”
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I Was Wrong, and So Are You – Magazine – The Atlantic
“After a hard look, I realized that they had bombed on the questions that challenged their position. A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position. “
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The One Percent Turns Class War Into Generational War | The Smirking Chimp
“The public should realize that “generational warfare” is an agenda that was deliberately designed by the 1 percent to distract the rest of us from the class war that they have been successfully waging over the last three decades. Rather than have a public debate on the policies that have redistributed so much income upward, the 1 percent want to pit children against their parents and grandparents, forcing them to fight over crumbs. “
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Occupy: What Architecture Can Do: Places: Design Observer
“Architecture is capable of mounting a profound critique of the status quo. In doing so, it can also model partial worlds and offer up these models for public discussion and disputation. Not perfect worlds, but possible ones. With respect to housing, then, is it not time to take up again the question of housing publics with renewed vigor, and with attention to the integral relation between housing models and structural, societal change? Is it not time, also, to refuse the so-called common sense of privatization and financialization, and to construct new processes, strategies or institutions — rather than ever more refined forms of indenture — dedicated to the common provision of shelter? Rather than be content with emergency measures, the field of architecture can take inspiration from the steadfast refusal to leave signaled by the Occupy movement, by refusing to play by the rules as written by developers and banks. And architectural thinking can contribute something invaluable to this extraordinary process by offering tangible models of possible worlds, possible forms of shelter, and possible ways of living together, to be debated in general assemblies both real and virtual. “
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“Algorithmic literacies would proceed from the assumption that computational processes increasingly influence how we perceive, talk about, and act in the world. Marxists used to call this type of effect “ideology,” although I’m not convinced of the adequacy of a term that still harbors connotations of false consciousness. Maybe Fredric Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping” is more appropriate, given the many ways in which algorithms help us to get our bearings in world abuzz with information. In any case, we need to start developing a vocabulary, one that would provide better theoretical tools with which to make sense of the epistemological, communicative, and practical entailments of algorithmic culture.”
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Declaration of Inter-Dependence
“There are times in history when right and wrong are sufficiently divergent that no ambiguity remains between them. This is such a moment. Recent decades have witnessed a de facto coup against the democratic structures of the world, and the wholesale capture and sabotage of the entire public regulatory apparatus. “
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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Unemployed Negativity: Getting to 99: Between #OccupyWallStreet and Mic Check!
“One second thought, it probably can’t be called that, the 99% is a way of thinking class, without thinking class, of addressing inequality without thinking about exploitation. It is inclusive to a fault, rather than deal with the antagonism of class it presents a society against a 1% seen as the epitome of greed and wealth.”
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Dissent Magazine – Arguing The World – The “Anarcho-Liberal” -
“Some things were broadly shared by “anarcho-liberals”: an anti-intellectualism that manifested itself in a rejection of “grand narratives” and structural critiques of capitalism, abhorrence for the traditional forms of left-wing organization, a localist impulse, and an individualistic tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with political action. The worst of both worlds, the “anarcho-liberal” can neither manage the capitalist state nor overcome it, and aspires to do both and neither at the same time.”
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The “Anarcho-Liberal” Considered, Pt. II
“But, as they say, that was then. This is now. The call to “improvise” comes in an entirely different context than its predecessors of ’68 and the late 90s. The sustained civic engagement; the focus on economic rights; the olive branches extended to labor; the resurrection of the general strike; hell, just the phrase “we are the 99%,” all work in concord to dispel many of the problems exhibited by the anarcho-liberal. That having been said, there are obviously profound similarities in OWS’s refusal to make demands and the character of “post-territorial” or symbolic politics. Does this matter? Probably. One hopes that it foments significant discussion, disagreement, dialogue and reckonings with past mistakes. But these concerns — i.e., worry that engaging the question of “what next?” will be forestalled by placing organizational regard over the articulation of a platform — are not a call for a return to traditional forms of political engagement. “
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The “Anarcho-Liberal” Considered
“Although the term “Tactical Media” may be unfamiliar to some readers, its ethos and freight are in evidence in bookstores, classrooms, activist canteens, and artist co-ops. And doubly so a decade ago. The phenomenon arose in late 80s/early 90s, unnamed, in the unholy union of techno-anarcho utopians (think R. U. Sirius, the triumphalist techno-fetishist spirit of Mondo 2000, and the brashness of industrial avant-garde) and the ascendant mode of political pranking dubbed “culture jamming” (think Adbusters and anti-advertising/anti-consumerist sentiment). In both instances there was an enthusiasm for technology, tacticality, and autonomism. And again, in both instances micro-politics replaced the macro. These were movements more preoccupied with stealth and speed than with the lumbering political processes of yesteryear. “
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“But it’s in the recommendations for adapting to technological change that this book really falls short. The program for winning the future, it turns out, consists of encouraging entrepreneurship and improving education. The former, the authors say, will allow us to discover a bounty of new ways of employing people, through the magic of Hayekian tacit knowledge and Schumpeterian creative destruction. And an improved education system will ensure that the general population has the necessary human capital to participate in this magical new economy. This is a remarkably thin vision, redolent of the kind of popular techno-libertarianism that flourished at the height of the dot-com bubble, and it’s no more compelling now than it was then.”
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A Note on the Occupations – Justin Erik Halldór Smith
“But the thing about this moment that I am trying to get at is that one doesn’t need the right temperament in order to be carried along with the mass upheaval. To say, I’m sorry, this just isn’t really my thing, is really nothing other than to say, I am an asshole, a wretch. And furthermore, fuck you. To say that this is just not one’s thing would be morally the same as that puerile gesture of the Chicago stock traders who announced with a sign in the window of their skyscraper, We Are the 1%. To not acknowledge that the various Occupations are good and right is to side with those cretins. There’s really no other choice. “
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“OWS isn’t a political entity. It doesn’t need your support. It’s sounding an alarm. Whether you heed it is up to you, and you ar the one who will gain or suffer as a result of your actions. Not them.”
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Conscience of a Radical: Corey Robin’s “The Reactionary Mind” – By Connor Kilpatrick – The eXiled
“Robin’s thesis is simple: ignore the Right-wing taxonomy. Conservatism–despite the seemingly incompatible respective ideologies of free-marketeers, slavers, neocons, neofascists, Buckleys, Federalists, Bloombergians, traditionalists, Tea Baggers, Randians, McCarthyists, libertarians, Birchers, Goldbugs, Jesus Freaks, J .Edgars, pro-lifers—has been, in reality, firmly united behind a single mission since the French Revolution: the creation of new regimes of privilege and domination in the face of democratic threats.”
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“Contemporary capitalism, we are often told, is characterized by the relentless pursuit of efficiency. In one telling, a more efficient economy is one that gets more output out of the same amount of labor and resources. But from another perspective, a streamlined and ultra-efficient economy is one which produces more and faster in normal times, but which can only do so by cutting out the safeguards and redundancies that protect the system from catastrophic failure when things go bad. Thus the global economy becomes simultaneously more dynamic and more fragile. As Felix Salmon puts it, “as a general rule, the more efficient something is, the easier it is to break.” Both the economics and the politics of neoliberalism are turning out to be very efficient and very easy to break. “
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Jawbone’s $99 Up is ready to boost your health — Mobile Technology News
“The latest health monitor hitting the market comes from Jawbone, a company that has made its name by designing wireless headsets for phones. Called the Jawbone Up, the wrist-worn device launches on Nov. 6 for $99. Similar to the company’s prior products, the Up looks sleek and fashionable while being functional: Up measures activity, sleep and nutrition.”
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The Benjamin Franklin Effect « You Are Not So Smart
“The Misconception: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate. The Truth: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm.”
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DRONES and US Internal Security – Global Guerrillas
Drones are changing the dynamics of warfare in very scary ways. They make oppression much easier (and cost-effective).
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Ming the Mechanic: Seeing the world through the Internet
As the world is speeding up, becoming more complex and more inter-connected, it is becoming increasingly more important to be able to see what is going on in a wider sphere. There are a lot of forces at work that sabotage this. Information silos that keep things to themselves, inside their own sites, to hold on to customers and be more valuable. A culture where few people report on things, and most others just re-transmit the reports, without taking time to verify anything for themselves. Protocols that encourage information to be disconnected from their sources. For better or for worse, the Internet was constructed that way. You don’t know if the e-mail you just got really was from the person it says it is from. You don’t know where most of the information on web pages comes from. Better, more trustworthy, less fragmented technologies can be developed. In the meantime, your best bet for seeing the world more as it is, is to seek out unfiltered, unguarded communication channels. Seek out or create feeds of stuff that it would be impractical for anybody to doctor or police. Poke holes through the armor of large organizations, force them to open up unfiltered streams of any kind.
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What happened to irony? – History – Salon.com
Philosophy professor Jonathan Lear sets out to answer this question in his new book, “A Case for Irony,” attempting to redefine and flesh out this term from the pat and the vague. In Lear’s view, irony is not just about humor: It’s meant to serve as a sobering mirror to our lives and actions, revealing and reaffirming to us our passions and beliefs. It shows how exactly we measure up to our professed ideals, all in an effort to strive for excellence – to become better at whatever it is we devote our lives to. Irony asks us, in a fundamental way, “Am I really who I say I am?”
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The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism :: Monthly Review
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Dissent Magazine – Online Features – In Defense of Hippies -
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Dissent Magazine – Online Features – Symposium: Organizing and Therapeutic Politics -
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Dissent Magazine – Summer 2011 Issue – Politics’ Fatal Therap…
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Coding Horror: Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats
“All teachers of programming find that their results display a ‘double hump’. It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve. “
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Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research
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Ressentiment: how sniping at OWS feeds a dangerous populism | openDemocracy
Maybe the self-appointed Captain Renaults who say they’re shocked, shocked, by what they’ve uncovered in the occupations should expend less energy on exposing feckless hippies and agitators and take a look in the mirror.
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In Defense of Nostalgia — In These Times
Mad Men culture, etc.
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Tornado chasers swap storm stories at weather festival | Reuters
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Untangling the web: how the internet has changed the way we treat death | Technology | The Observer
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Chris Mooney | The Bias Trap: Are We All Just A Bunch of Motivated Reasoners?
“In any case, while I agree that everybody has biases, I’m not sure that means I must also agree that everybody is equally biased. To butcher George Orwell, why couldn’t it be the case that all humans are biased, but are some humans are more biased than others?”
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Chris Mooney | What’s Up With Conservative White Men and Climate Change Denial?
“They’re the conservative white men (CWM) of climate change denial, and we’ve all gotten to know them in one way or another. But we haven’t had population-level statistics on them until recently, courtesy of a new paper in Global Environmental Change (apparently not online yet, but live in the blogosphere as of late last week) by sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap. It’s entitled “Cool Dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States.” Among other data, McCright and Dunlap show the following: — 14% of the general public doesn’t worry about climate change at all, but among CWMs the percentage jumps to 39%. — 32% of adults deny there is a scientific consensus on climate change, but 59% of CWMs deny what the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists have said. — 3 adults in 10 don’t believe recent global temperature increases are primarily caused by human activity. Twice that many – 6 CWMs out of every ten – feel that way. “
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I cite: Activistism and not thinking (Featherstone, Henwood, Parenti)
“Thoughtful people find this censorious hyperpragmatism alienating and can drop away from organizing as a result. But that’s not the only problem. It’s important to encourage better thinking, says Jiramanus, “so hippie-to-yuppie doesn’t happen again.” As she points out, without an analysis of what’s really wrong with the world – or a vision of the better world you’re trying to create – people have no reason to continue being activists once a particular campaign is over. In this way, activist-ism plus single-issue politics can end up defeating itself. Activistism is tedious, and its foot soldiers suffer constant burnout. Thinking, after all, is engaging; were it encouraged, Jiramanus pleads, “We’d all be enjoying ourselves a bit more.” “
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“Almost all of the $8 in added debt since 2000 can be traced to policies enacted under the cover of post-September 11th nationalism; these policies cemented the transition from neoliberalism to full-blown neoconservatism. Nothing more accurately illustrates the contradictory movements of the neoliberal project than the biography of the fundamentalist son of an American-owned autocrat, who spent millions of American dollars expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan, then bankrolled and organized September 11th, then was assassinated by the US and dumped into the ocean.”
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the californian ideology – the hypermedia research centre – University of Westminster
“At this crucial juncture, a loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age: the Californian Ideology. This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley.”
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NRAO Science Website — Science Website
National Radio Astronomy Observatory “The NRAO operates a complementary, state-of-the-art suite of radio telescope facilities for use by the scientific community, regardless of institutional or national affiliation: the Very Large Array (VLA), the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). The NRAO is building two new major research facilities in partnership with the international community that will soon open new scientific frontiers: the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA). Access to ALMA observing time by the North American astronomical community will be through the North American ALMA Science Center (NAASC).”
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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Contrary Brin: How to Define Science Fiction
“After all, the core postulate of true SF is that children can sometimes learn from their parents mistakes… not that they will always do so! This is why genuine sci fi tragedies like On The Beach and Soylent Green are so powerful. “This does not have to happen,” say Huxley and Orwell and Slonczewski and Tiptree, in their masterful self-preventing prophecies. Be smarter, better people. Be a better people.”
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Demos | Publications | See-through Science
“In See-through Science, James Wilsdon and Rebecca Willis argue that we are on the cusp of a new phase in debates over science and society. Public engagement is about to move upstream. Scientists need to find ways of listening to and valuing more diverse forms of public knowledge and social intelligence. Only by opening up innovation processes at an early stage can we ensure that science contributes to the common good. Debates about risk are important. But the public also want answers to the more fundamental questions at stake in any new technology: Who owns it? Who benefits from it? To what purposes will it be directed?”
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Demos | Publications | The Public Value of Science
“In many ways, science has never had it so good. Research budgets are as high as they’ve ever been and are still rising. And science and innovation are core themes of Labour’s third term agenda. But the relationship between science and wider society still needs work. Fewer people are becoming scientists, university departments are closing and there is lingering public unease about the way that science is governed. This pamphlet argues that we need to find new ways of talking about and building ‘the public value of science’. Britain’s hope of becoming the best place in the world to do science rests as much on giving scientists the freedom and incentive to renew their institutions and practices, as it does on 10-year frameworks and R&D targets.”
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Demos | Publications | The Received Wisdom
“We know that experts can no longer rely upon public deference, but the problem goes deeper than trust. Rebuilding expert advice for the 21st century means looking at what counts as knowledge. Opening-up needs to mean more than showing people how expert advice works. Opening-up needs to mean open-mindedness, it needs to mean asking new questions and it needs to mean listening to a much wider range of perspectives. Expertise is about more than evidence. It is also about judgement and wisdom. Our argument is not that we should reject the received wisdom in favour of the wisdom of crowds. But we need to go beyond a simple model of ‘evidence-based policy.’ Drawing on recent case studies and research with ‘lay members’ of expert committees, this pamphlet looks to a new model of expertise which is more diverse, takes better account of uncertainty, is aware of its context and trusts the public.”
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Times Higher Education – Theory of reciprocity
“It is clear that scientists simply saying that they know best is not enough for social or political action – take vaccines, climate change, nutrition, drugs policy (pharmaceutical or otherwise), energy, badger culling, or even – to be retro for a moment – mad cow disease, for example. To have impact, the public must believe the science, not just have it delivered to them. Belief is a social process, and this is where experts on the social can have a powerful role to play.”
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America: Excelling at Mediocrity – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review
“today, America excels at mediocrity. After decades of erasing the last luminous wisps of a once awe-inspiring excellence, today, it’s perfected the art of imagining, designing, mega-financing, and mass-producing the tedious, humdrum, banal, middle of the road, bland, trivial, forgettable, the less than exhilarating — whose side effects may include unemployment, stagnation, insecurity, distrust, meaninglessness, depression, and dumbification. And it might be that all the preceding is what lurching machine age “markets”, “corporations”, “finance” and “profit” optimize an economy for — and further, what they shape the minds of a people to come to expect as the limit of the possible (until, of course, a metamovement reminds them that it’s not).”
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Freakonomics » Horizontal vs. Vertical: An International Comparison of Teaching Methods
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The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: A Field Guide To Revolution – III
“Direct Revolution”
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Steve Jobs, 1955–2011 – Op-Ed – Domus
“We can hardly overestimate Jobs’s impact on our environment. The decentralized nature of modern work would be impossible without the personal computer. As we navigate the landscape with smartphones, listening to a soundtrack of our choosing while staying in constant touch with our fellows, we have him to thank. To be sure, most of these developments would have come about anyway. Jobs’s life was a Braudelian crest of foam upon a technological sea. Moreover without employees like Jonathan Ive, Andy Hertzfeld, or Susan Kare, little of it would have been impossible. But without Steve Jobs, it would have been far less elegant, less compelling, and less fun. “
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Dennis Perrin: Freedom Fire Zones
“Oakland’s finest flipped with brutal flair. To be expected. The Occupy movement tests our owners’ patience. Occupiers not only dig in for a long haul, awareness and desires expanding, they’re making the political system look bad. Official tears shed for Arab demonstrators now seem cynical. Well, to those who took it seriously. Double standards are an American constant. Endorsed by God. Consecrated by the Founders.”
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Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue | Mother Jones
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Anthropology, Dialog, and “Intellectual reconstruction” | Savage Minds
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The Psychological Study of Smiling – Association for Psychological Science
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Confessions of a Community College Dean: The Tortoise and the Hare
” A study from the National Bureau for Economic Research says that the income gains from specifically vocational majors (as opposed to liberal arts majors) peter out relatively early in life. By midlife, the liberal arts majors are actually out-earning the vocational majors, on average. The most dramatic fades occur in apprenticeship programs.”
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Stumbling and Mumbling: Nice doesn’t pay
“Luckily, research (pdf) by Guido Heineck tackles just this question. Unluckily, his findings are depressing. He looked at the correlations between UK individuals’ earnings and “big five” personality traits, controlling for other things such as age, education, marital status and region.”
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New England Fall Foliage: Why bright red leaves are in danger. – Slate Magazine
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Radical Conservatives – Hullabaloo
“In essence, as D’Souza rightly points out, conservatives aren’t actually looking to preserve society as we know it, but rather to destroy it. It’s drastically imperfect to be sure, but Western society is based on and strives for humanistic ideals. It often falls far, far short of the mark. But those are the ideals we teach our children, and those ideals are in the very air we breathe.”
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Information Processing and Learning 10-704
“What’s the connection between how many bits we can send over a channel and how accurately we can classify documents or fit a curve to data? Is there any connection between decision trees, prefix codes and wavelet transforms? What about error-correcting codes, graphical models and compressed sensing? “
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Sometimes I just sits and thinks, and sometimes … « The Thesis Whisperer
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elearnspace › The open access debate
“During the talk, he used the image below (from this article – .pdf) to argue that journal publishers have a monopoly. The surface progress of openness belies a deeper, more dramatic period of conflict around openness that is only now beginning. “
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DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Bibliographies about Open Access from Digital Scholarship
“Below is a list of digital/paperback books and digital bibliographies from Digital Scholarship that cover open access topics.”
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The unhelpful lionization of small business | Felix Salmon
“The facts of the matter are stark: larger businesses are more productive (this will come as a shock to anybody who spends most of their life in meetings, but it seems to be true), and they even create more jobs, once you control for firm age. Or, to put it another way: it’s not small businesses which create jobs, it’s startups.”
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O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies
“O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies is a peer-reviewed, open-access, and post-disciplinary journal devoted to object-oriented studies, both situated within and traversing the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the arts. The journal aims to cultivate current streams of thought already established within object-oriented studies, while also providing space for new pathways along which disparate voices and bodies of object-oriented knowledges might encounter, influence, perturb, and motivate one another.”
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10+ .htaccess snippets to optimize your website | CatsWhoCode.com
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OWS’s Beef: Wall Street Isn’t Winning It’s Cheating | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
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The Valve – A Literary Organ | Objects, Description, and Objectification
“It has just occurred to me that Latour’s interest in description in his domain—“No scholar should find humiliating the task of description“—and my interest in description in mine stem from the same root, the need for objectification. Description is a way of providing objects for one to think about. Mathematics can do this as well, that is, whatever mathematics may be to the pure mathematician, other thinkers use is as tool for description. “
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Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance – Less Wrong
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The Epicurean Dealmaker: You’re Doing It Wrong
“In the meantime, we need to reinvent our rulemaking processes. Currently we make laws and regulations like oysters make pearls, except instead of starting with a tiny grain of sand and covering it with precious nacre, we start with a tiny pearl of sensible principles and cover it with layer upon layer of sand, grit, and detritus. This makes for ugly pearls, and lousy legislation.”
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The Music Underground | Feature | Oakland, Berkeley & Bay Area News & Arts Coverage
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cities against culture – oakland’s secret music venues « orgtheory.net
“When I hear folks like Richard Florida praise wealthy artistic types as fuel for urban development, I feel like they leave out this part of the equation. People think about operas or high price jazz clubs. But they should also think about the grungy substrata of mico-scenes and think about how cities should be encouraged to lay off and let them grow.”
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“The metaphor of “occupation” strikes me as a provocative one not only for what the activists in Manhattan and elsewhere are doing, but for what they are struggling against.”
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The Wild Ride of the Wealthiest 1% – WSJ.com
“The once-stable incomes of America’s biggest earners now fluctuate dramatically from year to year. And as go the rich, so goes much of the economy. “
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“Removal of top predators trickles through the food web”
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A cultural thought experiment – Charlie’s Diary
“Which got me wondering whether the future that is already here might include a class for whom space travel is not merely an interesting idea, but one that is affordable.”
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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Can We Still Write Big Question Sorts of Books? | Savage Minds
David Graeber reflects on writing a big question book for a popular audience.
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Why aren’t there more pop-culture books about the internet by professional sociologists?
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Jon Taplin’s Home Page » New Federalism Revisited
“As I have noted many times on this blog, I am with Jefferson and not Hamilton in the dispute over Federalism. I want the Federal Government to have less power and less money, so they don’t piss trillions down the drain in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have had promises for 60 years of a “peace dividend†that never materialized. It’s time to change strategy and make this Republic work again.”
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Open the Future: The Foresight Paradox
“In every foresight or forecasting exercise, there are two overarching tensions: The more certain and detailed the forecast, the more people will accept it and believe it to be useful. The more certain and detailed the forecast, the less likely it is to happen.”
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Colin Crouch – The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism — Crooked Timber
“Colin Crouch – The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism “
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SIGMA - Forgetting our American tradition
“Today we face (but largely ignore) a major historical anomaly. From our nation’s birth all the way until the end of the Vietnam War, America’s chief approach to dealing with danger — both anticipated threats and those that took us by surprise — was to rely upon a robust citizenry to quickly supplement, augment and reinforce the thin veneer of professionals in a relatively small peacetime warrior-protector caste. Toward this end, society relied primarily upon concepts of robustness and resilience, rather than attempting to anticipate and forestall every conceivable danger.”
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Solar Power from the Moon | World Future Society
Analysis of speculative Luna Ring project by a Japanese company that would put a solar power station on the moon.
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David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst* | Neuroanthropology
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ZotFile Awesomifies Zotero Attachments – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Stumbling and Mumbling: Occupy, & democracies
“My main point, though, is that the Occupyers are, potentially at least, a force for democracy in the best sense. And insofar as there is a tension between them and parliamentary democracy, so much the worse for the latter. “
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Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education
“What has happened to rationality? Not that it is necessarily in shorter supply than in the past, but rationality seems to be valued significantly less.”
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‘Everybody Knows’ – Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Sometimes, you don’t need big theories or newly published books in order to understand what’s going on around you. You certainly don’t need to listen to someone who would feel the need to prove he’s clever by calling himself “Chief of Confusion.†And you don’t need to wait for history to help you out, either. Some things are eternal truths. I vote to reject both theories. Instead, to understand what OSW protesters are about, I propose people simply listen to a few lines from “Everybody Knows,†sung by the smokey-voiced Leonard Cohen”
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W. enters my wife’s schoolboard race – Campaign Finance - Salon.com
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50% of All Workers Made Less than $26,000 in 2010 – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic
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Making Light: A simple four-item formula for turning story into fiction
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A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data – The Washington Post
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How To Frame Yourself: A Framing Memo For Occupy Wall Street | Common Dreams
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The Metamovement: Moving Beyond Marches and People in the Street « how to save the world
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Why Occupy Wall Street Is Bigger Than Left vs. Right | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
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“October 2011 marks two events in the Republican Party that political observers from ten years ago would have claimed were utterly impossible: first, an African-American man is leading in the polls for the Republican nominee for president. Second, the same GOP frontrunner openly admits he wants to hike taxes on most Americans.”
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Managing the #OTBR “crisis” – Hullabaloo
“According to a trade publication called Corporate Secretary, it’s time for the banks to do a little crisis management of Occupy the Boardroom:”
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Further Reflections on ‘Academostars’ - Innovations – The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Which States Ban Atheists from Holding Public Office? – Friendly Atheist | Underpaid Genius
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Political Descent: The Politics of Evolution in the classroom
Scopes Trial and more.
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Specifying infrastructures cont. – Installing (Social) Order
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L’Hôte: blogging is a system of control
“The truth of the matter is that the blogosphere is largely a closed loop. The ability of individuals, particularly those dedicated to amateur blogging (out of principle or out of practicality), to penetrate the larger conversation is quite small. As Yglesias laments, the capture of the blogosphere by the media and think tank apparatus means that there are now a whole host of gatekeepers who rigorously police the online discussion and determine which voices are heard. It’s hard to think of anyone who has come up in prominence the last few years who was not quickly co-opted into the service of a large media or political entity. “
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Cultivating Freedom: Occupy Wall Street « Larval Subjects .
“And here it seems to me that there’s a bizarre and surprising way in which Dennett comes very close to Zizek and Badiou in his discussions of freedom. It seems to me that the work of Zizek and Badiou is primarily motivational. Where, for years, we got Continental social and political theory after theory demonstrating all of the ways in which we are secretly determined by forces behind our backs such as the secret machinations of language (Lacan will go so far as to say we’re “cuckold†by language in Seminar 5, that language uses us rather than we using language), or power or “social forces†or economics or any of the other sundry forces that invade our lives, where theory has paralyzed us with self-doubt, leading us to wonder “are these truly emancipatory aims and practices or are we just reproducing ideology?â€, Zizek and Badiou have everywhere sought to cultivate the belief that we are free, that we can act, that we can decide. For them– and they’re right –the belief that we can choose and act is every bit as important as actually acting and choosing. And if this is the case, then this is because without that prior belief we never will choose or act (Zizek is quite explicit on this point throughout all of his writings).”
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Sociology and History: Shapin on the Merton Thesis « Ether Wave Propaganda
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Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr | Rortybomb
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I cite: Video of Jacobin debate at Bluestockings (from 10/14/2011)
“That’s why we organized a public debate and panel discussion in Manhattan last Friday about Occupy Wall Street and left politics and strategy. Held at Bluestockings, a radical bookstore on the Lower East Side, the event was packed, the audience overwhelmingly young, and the atmosphere electric: just that morning, thousands had gathered to lock arms and defend the occupiers from Bloomberg’s threat to evict them, and the mayor’s last minute decision to back down had been cause for jubilation.”
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Norms, “Ideologyâ€, and the Move against “Functionalist†Sociology « Ether Wave Propaganda
Very interesting summary of debates on SSK and Mertonian science studies during the mid-20c. Describes the move away from functional, ideal-type, descriptions a la Merton to more historically specific microhistories a la Daston.
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Declaration of Interdependence | About us | David Suzuki Foundation
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“A New York police officer leans forward and yells as if attempting, with the sheer force of his anger, to hold back time. His rage is understandable for, in this photograph, you can actually see the world turn upside down and all that was solid melt into air. This truly is a picture of a turning point in the history of the world.”
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The Creative Class Joins the Working-Class | Working-Class Perspectives
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Decades Old Calvin and Hobbes Strip Succinctly Explains Occupy Wall Street Movement
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“In one of our workshops, participants hit upon the idea of colonization as a way to describe how we became separated from the commons. Our culture is saturated in the market paradigm. The concepts of consumer, ownership, private, worth, and profit define how we think about ourselves, our relationship to each other and everything we encounter. It displaces all other ways of making connections and finding meaning. “
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The Partisan and the Political
“To summarize the thesis: ordinary people hate partisanship, and elites hate ideology. Hence the elite is constantly attempting to misrepresent the latter as the former. And the masses sometimes respond by repudiating ideology when they mean to reject partisanship. “
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Imaginary magnitude › Shutting down science
“spend some time during the coming months studying the politics and practice of shutting down large-scale scientific facilities.”
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UnderstandingSociety: Historiography and the philosophy of history
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Exploring the Scientific Method: Cases and Questions, Gimbel
“Exploring the Scientific Method pairs classic and contemporary readings in the philosophy of science with milestones in scientific discovery to illustrate the foundational issues underlying scientific methodology. Students are asked to select one of nine possible fields—astronomy, physics, chemistry, genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, economics, or geology—and through carefully crafted case studies trace its historical progression, all while evaluating whether scientific practice in each case reflects the methodological claims of the philosophers. This approach allows students to see the philosophy of science in action and to determine for themselves what scientists do and how they ought to do it.”
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The Politics of Systems | Thoughts about Software, Power, and Digital Method
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“The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University created PressForward to explore and produce the best means for collecting, screening, and drawing attention to the vast expanse of scholarship that is currently decentralized across the web or does not fit into traditional genres such as the journal article or the monograph.”
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A Baker’s Dozen of Key Historical Books about the Space Shuttle | Roger Launius’s Blog
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Contrary Brin: Was 1957 America Better Than Today? (An Outright Rant!)
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Small technologies, big change: Rethinking infrastructure through STS and geography
“Infrastructure tends to be conceived as stabilized and ‘black-boxed’ with little interaction from users. This fixity is in flux in ways not yet fully considered in either geography or science and technology studies (STS). Driven by environmental and economic concerns, water utilities are increasingly introducing efficiency technologies into infrastructure networks. These, I argue, serve as ‘mediating technologies’ shifting long-accepted socio-technical and environmental relationships in cities. The essay argues for a new approach to infrastructure that, by integrating insights from STS and geography, highlights its malleability and offers conceptual tools to consider how this malleability might be fostered. “
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Blowup: The Era of Objects — V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media
“We are rapidly entering (and perhaps even have already entered) an era where we are able to print 3D objects at our desks, make and share laser-cut gifts for friends, and use off-the-shelf tools to plug these creations into the web and have them send status updates on our behalf. We have some commonly-held visions of the future, but what could our very wildest dreams (and nightmares) look like, beyond the cliché of the flying car? What answers can we find in speculative design? Our expert guests will explore these questions in collaboration with the audience in a hands-on, “open think-tank” format.”
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More Bathtubs « The Baseline Scenario
“The underlying issue seems what they call the correlation heuristic: people think that the behavior of a stock (the amount of water in the tub) should be similar to the behavior of its inputs (the rate at which water pours from the faucet). This is especially a problem when it comes to understanding climate change. In another experiment, most people thought that stabilizing emissions was sufficient to stabilize the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; if you think about it, though, you should realize that if you want the level to be stable, inflows have to equal outflows (and right now inflows are about double outflows).”
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“Accumulation is a fundamental process in dynamic systems: inventory accumulates production less shipments; the national debt accumulates the federal deficit. Effective decision making in such systems requires an understanding of the relationship between stocks and the flows that alter them. However, highly educated people are often unable to infer the behavior of simple stock–flow systems. In a series of experiments we demonstrate that poor understanding of accumulation, termed stock–flow failure, is a fundamental reasoning error. Persistent poor performance is not attributable to an inability to interpret graphs, lack of contextual knowledge, motivation, or cognitive capacity. Rather, stock–flow failure is a robust phenomenon that appears to be rooted in failure to appreciate the most basic principles of accumulation, leading to the use of inappropriate heuristics. We show that many people, including highly educated individuals with strong technical training, use what we term the “correlation heuristicâ€, erroneously assuming that the behavior of a stock matches the pattern of its flows. We discuss the origins of stock–flow failure and implications for management and education.”
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Graeber reports on his role in the development of Occupy Wall Street.
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The moral discipline of curatorship | Medical Museion
“We praise upbeat creative curatorship. But we should also remember to praise curators who handle their material and textual ressources with honesty and humility. Such curators are in tune with reality and help satisfy our hunger for reality. Their work leads them away from themselves towards the things themselves; and a result they probably also help lead the museum visitors away from themselves towards the world outside them.”
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Who Says What to Whom on Twitter | Yahoo! Research
“We study several longstanding questions in media communications research, in the context of the microblogging service Twitter, regarding the production, flow, and consumption of information. To do so, we exploit a recently introduced feature of Twitter—known as Twitter lists—to distinguish between elite users, by which we mean specifically celebrities, bloggers, and representatives of media outlets and other formal organizations, and ordinary users. Based on this classification, we find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter—roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users—where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. We also find significant homophily within categories: celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc; however, bloggers in general rebroadcast more information than the other categories. Next we re-examine the classical “two-step flow” theory of communications, finding considerable support for it on Twitter, but also some interesting differences. Third, we find that URLs broadcast by different categories of users or containing different types of content exhibit systematically different lifespans. And finally, we examine the attention paid by the different user categories to different news topics.”
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Study: Many college students not learning to think critically | McClatchy
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Nyiragongo Crater: Journey to the Center of the World – The Big Picture – Boston.com
“In June 2010, a team of scientists and intrepid explorers stepped onto the shore of the lava lake boiling in the depths of Nyiragongo Crater, in the heart of the Great Lakes region of Africa.”
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A communication-centered explanation of the difficulty to reform Wall Street so far would depend largely on which view of public opinion and the nature of the public sphere (indeed, which view of democracy) you adopt. Â University of Pennsylvania Provost and communication researcher Vincent Price (2008) usefully describes four models of the public sphere that could potentially apply to the U.S. at various points in the debate over financial reform and other issues:
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Protests of summer 2012 will shape decade to come
The tumultuous summer of 2012 will also hold some welcome surprises. It will be a time when frustrated citizens find common ground in the streets, and demonstrators will be astonished by who is standing next to them. Commonality could well reverse the political fragmentation that has defined the last decade. Above all, the summer of 2012 will share one thing with what transpired in the 1960s: What unfolds in 2012 will unquestionably reshape our society in the decade to come.
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Networks Understanding Networks | MIT Media Lab
Economies are networks of businesses, just as businesses are networks of people, and people are networks of cells. Networks are everywhere, and the Media Lab’s fall sponsor event celebrated their ubiquity by exploring how these structured interactions affect our economy, businesses, health, and even the way we understand ourselves.
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U.S. Intellectual History: Occupy Wall Street: The Culture Wars of the “New Class�
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“What do people use to get stuff done?”
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From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world | Reuters
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Is Occupy Wall Street a Constituent Moment, And Not A Movement? | Underpaid Genius
“The elections of 2012 could be radically altered by the fallout from Occupy Wall Street, and the movements that are likely to be spun out of that constituency. I’m predicting widespread civil unrest in the summer of 2012, as the law and order forces of the right ratchet up their intolerance and the new movements seeth with impatience.”
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Why Occupy Wall Street is Not the Tea Party of the Left | Foreign Affairs
“Charles Tilly, the late Columbia sociologist, divided movements into three types, based on the policies they demand, the constituencies they claim to represent, and the identities they are trying to construct. Both the civil rights movement and the Tea Party combined the first and second goals. Occupy Wall Street is what we might call a “we are here” movement. Asking its activists what they want, as some pundits have demanded, is beside the point. Participants are neither disillusioned Obama supporters, nor or a “mob,” as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor cynically described them. By their presence, they are saying only, “Recognize us!”"
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Higher and lower virtues in commercial society: Adam Smith and motivation crowding out
“Motivation crowding out can lead to a reduction of ‘higher’ virtues, such as altruism or public spirit, in market contexts. This article discusses the role of virtue in the moral and economic theory of Adam Smith. It argues that because Smith’s account of commercial society is based on ‘lower’ virtue, ‘higher’ virtue has a precarious place in it; this phenomenon is structurally similar to motivation crowding out. The article analyzes and systematizes the ways in which Smith builds on ‘contrivances of nature’ in order to solve the problems of limited self-command and limited knowledge. As recent research has shown, a clear separation of different social spheres can help to reduce the risk of motivation crowding out and preserve a place for ‘higher virtue’ in commercial society. The conclusion reflects on the performative power of economics, arguing that the one-sided focus on models of ‘economic man’ should be embedded in a larger context. “
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Occupy Wall Street, Social Media, Gladwell and Risk – event mechanics – event mechanics
“I want to suggest that the dichotomy between high risk protest and low risk participation that Gladwell isolates as typifying most historical social mmovement protests versus most contemporary online social movement participation is actually spot on. What is remarkable about the Occupy Wall Street protests is not that the ‘internets’ have somehow produced an effective mode of protest, but that the risks involved in the esculation of protest from low-risk online participation (‘liking’ a social movement on Facebook, for example) into actual high-risk toe-to-toe in-the-street vaulting-the-barricades mobilisation have now become risks worth taking for the majority of participants. “
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Selflessness Gone Awry, and the Damage It Can Cause - NYTimes.com
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Overcoming Bias : The End of Possibility
“Yes, new tech have recently given us each more options, but this is mainly because new tech tends to make us each richer. Wealth gives options. If our descendants are, as I suspect, much poorer than we, they may well have fewer options than us. And eventually economic growth and tech innovation must slow to a crawl. Our finite universe simply cannot continue our exponential growth rates for a million years. For trillions of years thereafter, possibilities will be known and fixed, and for each person rather limited.”
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“Until the 2000s, in every economic expansion, labor got the bulk of the increase in GDP, typically over 60%, via more jobs and increased pay. Post 2000, there was an astonishing change, a shift from labor share, which fell to below 30%, and a massive increase in corporate profits. In other words, there was huge shift away from labor to capital. This has little to do with globalization and much to do with the weakened bargaining power of US workers. As much as it has become fashionable to look down on unions (and their corruption and short-sightedness hasn’t helped), having well paid blue collar workers helped the negotiating position of non-unionized white collar employees.”
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Stumbling and Mumbling: The decline of newspapers
“What I mean is that it’s tempting to blame newspapers’ troubles on the rise of the internet and on regulation. But I suspect there are other things at work.”
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History and the Decline of Human Violence: Scientific American
interview with Steven Pinker
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What just happened? Why some of us seem totally spaced out | KurzweilAI
“A new study of the brain by University of Cambridge scientists explains why some people can’t tell the difference between what they saw and what they imagined or were told about — such as whether they or another person said something, or whether an event was imagined or actually occurred.”
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We Thought They Wanted to Be Like Buffett - NYTimes.com
“The Congressional Research Service found that 200,000 millionaires — almost two-thirds of taxpayers with taxable income above $1 million — paid a lower tax rate (combining income and payroll taxes) than the typical taxpayer making less than $100,000.”
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Wintermute : Eventually there will be a subculture of ghosts.
“These people will not own cell phones. They will not run blogs or update statuses on social networks. “
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What We Assume When We Assume Rationality « A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book
“And that’s a big part of why I’m not an economist. And I think it’s a really helpful scope condition – in cases where it makes the most sense to think of an individual (or, importantly, a firm) as a unified actor with stable preferences, economics has a lot of insight. But I think it can also lead to either frustration (why are these people so irrational?!) or prescriptive rather than descriptive findings (here’s how they should be rational!). In other words, economists, and economic thought, try to make the world more like the one they assume it to be by helping individuals be true to themselves, and by ignoring how much individuals usually aren’t. “
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WorldWise – The Chronicle of Higher Education
“For one thing that I have found really interesting about the turn to speculative realism is that is has clearly been fuelled by online communities which have turned above all to blogs as an important means of swapping material, revealing first thoughts, and making revisions. I doubt that the growth of speculative realism would have been so insistent without these communities scattered all over the world, or so rapid. Why?”
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The Democracy of Objects by Levi Bryant – University of Michigan Library
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Neurology vs. Psychiatry: The Social Production of Knowledge » Sociological Images
“The divisions between neurology and psychiatry suggested in the image above stir up lots of interesting questions not only about what we consider to be “neurological†or “psychiatricâ€, but more generally about the social production of knowledge.”
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Teaching STS with “A fist full of quarters” – Installing (Social) Order
“One way I teach students the philosophy of science is by using the documentary “The King of Kong: A fist full of quarters.”"
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the back-to-the-future MBA, or for $100,000 they get what, exactly? « orgtheory.net
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Amanda Knox: What’s in a face? | World news | The Guardian
“Amanda Knox was convicted of murder and her reputation sullied around the world, in large part because of her facial expressions and demeanour. Her story reveals how our instincts about others can be dangerously superficial, writes Ian Leslie”
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The Philosopher’s Stone: ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN A MINI-TUTORIAL PART TWO
“Marcuse was powerfully struck by the fact that in a mature capitalist society, workers seem to internalize psychologically the demands of their bosses, treating the repression of their natural instincts in the factory or shop or office as signs of virtue rather than as painful constraints necessitated by the fact that they have been deprived of access to and ownership of the means of production.”
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ScreenFloat, a great productivity booster for Mac | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog
“ScreenFloat, now available on the Mac App Store, is a small utility that does one simple thing: float screenshots above all your other windows. “
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The Federal Geographic Data Committee — Federal Geographic Data Committee
“The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) is an interagency committee that promotes the coordinated development, use, sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data on a national basis. This nationwide data publishing effort is known as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). The NSDI is a physical, organizational, and virtual network designed to enable the development and sharing of this nation’s digital geographic information resources. FGDC activities are administered through the FGDC Secretariat, hosted by the U.S. Geological Survey.”
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The Field: Traité du Savoir-Vivre for the Occupy Wall Street Generations
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British Academy – Amartya Sen: “Other People” (British Academy Lecture 2000)
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The Architect Has No Clothes | On the Commons
“Environmental psychologists have long known about this widespread and puzzling phenomenon. Laboratory results show conclusively that architects literally see the world differently from non-architects. Not only do architects notice and look for different aspects of the environment than other people; their brains seem to synthesize an understanding of the world that has notable differences from natural reality. Instead of a contextual world of harmonious geometric relationships and connectedness, architects tend to see a world of objects set apart from their contexts, with distinctive, attention-getting qualities.”
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New Time-Lapse Video Shows NYC in All Its Beauty and Glory | INFRASTRUCTURIST
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digital digs: more wrong questions to ask about digital pedagogy
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CUNY Speculative Realism Talks « Larval Subjects .
Videos of Patricia Clough, Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, Graham Harman.
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I cite: Wrong message: Dave Winer on #OccupyWallStreet
“Not everything is included. It’s politically imperative not to let Occupy Wall Street become an omnibus container for any and all political sentiments. Not every position should be welcomed, encouraged, or tolerated. How this plays out in the General Assemblies is an effect of the local cultures, the activists involved, the patterns of interaction. In NY, the power dynamics are already reflected upon in discussions and working groups. I expect this is also the case already in the other sites. In the same way that racism, sexism, and homophobia have no place in the movement, it should also be the case that libertarian, capitalist, and financialist attempts to interpret and guide the movement are rejected”
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Politics averted: thoughts on the ‘Occupy X’ movement | Workers Solidarity Movement
“One of the major victories of neoliberalism is the eradication of the working-class from the popular consciousness. One of the results of this is the prevalence of the idea among certain sections of the left that the working-class is no longer relevant to understanding power in the modern world – an outdated idea clung to by old-left dinosaurs. This is reflected in the idea of ‘the 99%’ which has become the slogan of the ‘Occupy X’ movement, which expresses a very crude understanding of class, where the ruling class are an arbitrarily defined proportion of the wealthiest people in society.”
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Locus Online Reviews » Graham Sleight’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Thomas M. Disch
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SF Signal: The Joy of Thinking (And Reading) Weirdly
The word “weird” has a literary lineage, from the classic, often pulpy weird tales to contemporary permutations such as the “New Weird,” but for me, weird fiction is any writing that breaks the hold of realism and doubly-immerses me in its web of signification. Everyone immerses themselves once into a fiction, by accepting the words and letting their belief in the meanings of the symbols enter into their consciousness. Reading is an act both of imagination and cogitation, of making sense and creating worlds. But weird fiction pulls you into a second, deeper pool, where your beliefs are challenged, ridiculed, overthrown, or insulted.
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Daily Kos: Open Letter to that 53% Guy
“Do you really want the bar set this high? Â Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Â Is that your idea of the American Dream?”
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Lawrence Lessig: A Letter to the #Occup(iers): The principle of Non-contradiction
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Contrary Brin: People Who Don’t “Get” Transparency or Positive Sum Games
“The Enlightenment’s core discovery was the positive-sum game… ways that democracy, markets and science can “float all boats,” so that even those who aren’t top-winners can still see things get better, overall, year after year — leading to the diamond-shaped social structure we discussed in an earlier post (last week), with a vibrant and creative middle class outnumbering the poor.”
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Contrary Brin: Arguing With Your Crazy Uncle About Climate Change
“Forget “left-versus-right.” Or even arguments over taxes. The centerpiece of our current Phase Three of the American Civil War is the all-out campaign to discredit science.”
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Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation.
Approaching the limits of our understanding
Joi Ito posted about the cognitive limits of organizations at the MIT Media Lab blog.
Ito posts a thought provoking slide by Cesar Hidalgo. The slide shows the interaction between the total stock of information in the world and time/history. Human beings, as civilization has evolved, have grown the total stock of information in the world and over time have reached various cognitive limits. It’s not hard to reach the cognitive limit of the individual. Our individual limits are often painfully obvious.
Hidalgo and Ito suggest that we’ve reached another limit, the cognitive limit of the organization. Ito says that “Our world, is less and less about the single pieces of intellectual property and more and more about the networks that help connect these pieces. The total stock of information used in these ecosystems exceeds the capacity of single organizations because doubling the size of huge organizations does not double the capacity of that organization to hold knowledge and put it into productive use.”
One place where the problem of cognitive limits has been particularly damaging is with the problem of collective action. Over the past few months I’ve been trying to find a way to express the idea that the persistent scientific tendency to reduce a phenomenon to the simplest possible explanation is dangerous. The danger reaches its peak when the social sciences take on the positivist scientific ideology too enthusiastically. The result is a bunch of academic disciplines that are always on the lookout the foundations that will explain the phenomenon of the world. Foundationalism isn’t a complete fool’s bargain but it does imply a fundamental simplification of the world. I have yet to encounter an argument for foundationalism that doesn’t ignore a portion of the world. I think that the cognitive limits suggested by Ito and Hidalgo may be a major cause for why reductionism and foundationalism hold such a powerful appeal.
Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)
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“Bringing gopherspace back to modern operating systems, browsers and mobile devices Return to the Gopher protocol’s low bandwidth and high efficiency, right from your mobile phone or modern computer! Quickly connect to downloads, services and servers maintained across the global Gopherspace using the Overbite Project’s free open source gopher client software.”
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“I will divide my remarks into 8 parts; (1) I will argue that the Mortgage Interest Deduction is a residual of the 1913 tax code, and was not created to encourage homeownership; (2) that those on the margin of homeowning get little-to-no benefit from the Mortgage Interest Deduction, and that the policy therefore does little to encourage homeownership; (3) that the Mortgage Interest Deduction does encourage those who would be homeowners anyway to purchase larger houses than they otherwise would; (4) that even in the absence of the Mortgage Interest Deduction, owner-occupants receive a large tax benefit; (5) that phasing out the Mortgage Interest Deduction would encourage households to pay down their mortgages more quickly, and would therefore encourage households to rely less on leverage; (6) household deleveraging would lead to greater market stability, but would also mean that the revenues generated by the elimination of the deduction would be smaller than static estimates suggest; (7) at a time when the housing market remains quite weak, it is important that the Mortgage Interest Deduction be phased out carefully; (8) that if we do wish to encourage homeownership via tax policy, a targeted, refundable credit would be more effective than the current Mortgage Interest Deduction. “
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Nobel by association: beautiful mind, non-existent prize | openDemocracy
“The “Nobel prize for economics” is a fascinating story of how – as the global public was looking the other way – strategy and snobbery brought a symbolic currency to life. “
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“Their response to ‘We are the 99 per cent’ has been the snarky claim that ‘We are the 53 per cent’. This line is based on the lame and long-refuted WSJ ‘lucky duckies’ talking point, that low-wage workers ‘pay no income tax’.”
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“Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait that influences domains ranging from personal relationships to politics and finance. How people maintain unrealistic optimism, despite frequently encountering information that challenges those biased beliefs, is unknown. We examined this question and found a marked asymmetry in belief updating. Participants updated their beliefs more in response to information that was better than expected than to information that was worse. This selectivity was mediated by a relative failure to code for errors that should reduce optimism. “
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Your brain won’t allow you to believe the apocalypse could actually happen
“Basically, human optimism is a neurological bug that prevents us from remembering undesirable information about our odds of dying or being hurt. And that’s why nobody ever believes the apocalypse is going to happen to them.”
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Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party – NYTimes.com
by Todd Gitlin
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The Depression – If Only Things Were That Good – NYTimes.com
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6 things every new iPhone user should know — Apple News, Tips and Reviews
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Dissent Magazine – Arguing The World – Five Things That #OccupyWallStreet Has Done Right -
1. they chose the right target 2. they made a great poster 3. they gave their action time to build 4. they created a good scenario for conflict 5. they are using their momentum to escalate
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Using Jekyll and GitHub Pages for Our Site | Development Seed
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An Intuitive Guide To Exponential Functions & e | BetterExplained
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Milton Friedman’s Magical Thinking – Dani Rodrik – Project Syndicate
“Free-market enthusiasts’ place in the history of economic thought will remain secure. But thinkers like Friedman leave an ambiguous and puzzling legacy, because it is the interventionists who have succeeded in economic history, where it really matters.”
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interfluidity » The lump of unfairness fallacy
“The Obama administration’s response to the crisis was visibly poor in real time. Klein shrugs off the error as though it were inevitable, predestined. It was not. The administration screwed up, and they screwed up in a deeply toxic way. They defined “politically possible” to mean acceptable to powerful incumbents, and then restricted their policy advocacy to the realm of that possible. The administration could have chosen to fight for policies that would have been effective and fair rather than placate groups whose interests were opposed to good policy. They might not have succeeded, but even so, as Mike Koncazal puts it, they would have lost well. We would be better off with good policy options untried but still on the table than where we are now, with policy itself — monetary, fiscal, whatever — discredited as both ineffective and faintly corrupt.”
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“One of the presentations was by Ole Peters, from the Department of Mathematics at the Imperial College of London. His presentation compared time series analysis with ensemble analysis. Time series analysis takes one realization of a process and runs it over a very long time period and then looks at the distribution over the course of that run, whereas ensemble analysis creates many copies of the process and runs these over a shorter period, and then looks at the distribution of those results. Time series analysis is what you see over many years in one universe, ensemble analysis is what you see when you take many universes and integrate across them to look at the distributional properties. “
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Mnemonic Arbitrage « Mimi and Eunice
Mnemonic arbitrage occurs when an individual “[firms] up the present by experiencing it as a memory, by experiencing it from the future as a moment in the past”
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Tenured Radical – The Chronicle of Higher Education
My affection for the shiny objects Apple sells does, however, bring me to the part about Steve Jobs where we might want to interrupt the celebration of his life once again. Probably more than any other innovator, Jobs has made it possible to confuse one’s life with one’s lifestyle; he has made an Apple lifestyle appear universal when it can, in fact, be possessed by only a select group of people; and he has created the illusion that prosperity and grace (in the form of beautiful, expensive objects) can define a moment in history that is characterized by inequality and violence.
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#OWS: Have We Entered the Age of Protest? – Miller-McCune
“Sociologist David S. Meyer and political scientist Sidney Tarrow have called this the “social movement society.” In it, protest has moved from the fringe of American culture into the political mainstream. Over the last 30 years, it’s become easier to organize, and participation now comes with less of a cost. The number of people protesting has expanded, as have the causes they espouse. Protest has become ubiquitous, institutionalized even.”
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Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters | Journal of the mental environment
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Budget Cuts Spell the End of the National Biological Information Infrastructure | Spatial Sustain
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Against Public Choice, For Public Virtue | ThinkProgress
The observation that malgovernment is a major source of human ills is quite correct, but embracing fatalism about it only exacerbates the problem. What’s needed are efforts to push societies in the direction of taking honor and civic obligation more seriously, not less so.
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The Puzzle of Modern Economics: Science or Ideology? by Roger E. Backhouse – Powell’s Books
“Does economics hold the key to everything or does the recent financial crisis show that it has failed? This book provides an assessment of modern economics that cuts through the confusion and controversy on this question. Case studies of the creation of new markets, the Russian transition to capitalism, globalization, and money and finance establish that economics has been very successful where problems have been well defined and where the world can be changed to fit the theory, but that it has been less successful in tackling bigger problems. The book then offers a historical perspective on how economists have, since the Second World War, tried to make their subject scientific. It explores the evolving relationship between science and ideology and investigates the place of heterodoxy and dissent within the discipline. It is argued that, though there are problems with the discipline, economics is needed to combat the myths that abound concerning economic problems.”
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Mereology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
“Mereology (from the Greek μερος, ‘part’) is the theory of parthood relations: of the relations of part to whole and the relations of part to part within a whole.”
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Occupy Wall Street Library | The People’s Library at Liberty Plaza
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Open Science Summit | October 22-23, 2011
“The Open Science Summit unites researchers, life science industry professionals, students, patients and other stakeholders to discuss the future of collaborative science and innovation.”
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Occupy Wall Street protests and ‘The Decline of the West’ – The Washington Post
“Money is overthrown and abolished by blood.” Oswald Spengler wrote these words more than a century ago in The Decline of the West. And while the imagery here may be a bit much, there’s something of it in the Occupy Wall Street protests.!”
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“The BBC Domesday Project was a pair of interactive videodiscs made by the BBC in London to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book and published in November 1986. It was one of the major interactive projects of its time, and it was undertaken on a scale not seen since.”
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When there’s nobody really watching, when there’s nothing to confront, when there’s nothing to debate—this is what’s left: How is it possible to create forms of life for ourselves, even if its in the shadow of tall buildings that cast long shadows?
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Zimmer, Michael | School of Information Studies | UW-Milwaukee
With a background in new media and Internet studies, the philosophy of technology, and information policy, Zimmer studies the social, political, and ethical dimensions of new media and information technologies. His research and teaching focuses on: - Ethics and Information Technology - Information Policy - Web Search Engines - Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 - Privacy and Surveillance Theory - Information and Web Literacy - Access to Knowledge - Internet Research Ethics
A quick Textexpander hack
Textexpander on the Macintosh is one of the those utilities that becomes more and more useful over time.
Just the other week I was looking at some of Brett Terpestra’s snippets and trying to figure out how to use them for my workflow.
I often copy URL links for blog items between my RSS newsreader and a browser, like Firefox. But I really dislike the cruft that Feedburner puts into the URLs and I don’t want to save that cruft on any bookmarking services I might use.
So I figured that there had to be a sed recipe that I could use to trim off the URL cruft after the ?.
Sed is a wonderful program that makes life a lot easier on a unix based platform. Basically it will take a regular expression and then substitute whatever text you wish into the pattern matched.
I tried to match the starting hostname of the URL directly but then, in a flash of insight, realized that I could delete the stuff I didn’t want and still achieve the same effort.
So here’s my fancy script.
pbpaste | sed 's/\?.*//'
Output the current contents of the cilpboard and then delete everything after the question mark.