Flipping the corruption myth

corruption, finance, banking, capital, tax havens, world bank, tax avoidance

According to the World Bank, corruption in the form of bribery and theft by government officials, the main target of the UN Convention, costs developing countries between $20bn and $40bn each year. That’s a lot of money. But it’s an extremely small proportion - only about 3 percent - of the total illicit flows that leak out of public coffers. Tax avoidance, on the other hand, accounts for more than $900bn each year, money that multinational corporations steal from developing countries through practices such as trade mispricing. This enormous outflow of wealth is facilitated by a shadowy financial system that includes tax havens, paper companies, anonymous accounts, and fake foundations, with the City of London at the very heart of it. Over 30 percent of global foreign direct investment is booked through tax havens, which now collectively hide one-sixth of the world’s total private wealth. This is a massive - indeed, fundamental - cause of poverty in the developing world, yet it does not register in the mainstream definition of corruption, absent from the UN Convention, and rarely, if ever, appears on the agenda of international development organisations.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/01/flipping-corruption-myth–201412094213280135.html

The drug revolution that no one can stop

psychedelics, experimentation, drugs, drug policy, prohibition, medium

Many of those who design drugs do so merely to push the boundaries: these “psychonauts” as they are sometimes known, are early adopters of new drugs. Some share their knowledge freely and collaboratively; some are intensely geeky; some are pretentious and elitist chemical grandstanders, eager to be the first to try and document any new drug. Many psychonauts are extremely cautious, and fastidious in dosing and documenting a drug’s effects. Others still are reckless risk-takers—people who will try anything for a kick. One user I spoke to enjoyed his experiences with mushrooms so much that he began to seek out all the new hallucinogens he could find. He is a passionate advocate for psychedelics: “In life, you’re battling through the undergrowth and every so often it’s good to climb a tall tree to get your bearings. This is what psychedelics do for me.”

https://medium.com/matter/19f753fb15e0

How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time

time, perception, music, neurophysiology

The human brain, we have learned, adjusts and recalibrates temporal perception. Our ability to encode and decode sequential information, to integrate and segregate simultaneous signals, is fundamental to human survival. It allows us to find our place in, and navigate, our physical world. But music also demonstrates that time perception is inherently subjective—and an integral part of our lives. “For the time element in music is single,” wrote Thomas Mann in his novel, The Magic Mountain. “Into a section of mortal time music pours itself, thereby inexpressibly enhancing and ennobling what it fills.”

http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/how-music-hijacks-our-perception-of-time

The Quantum Mechanics of Fate

retrocausality, time, past, presetn, future, QM, physics, spacetime, arrow of time

As with so much else in quantum mechanics, this concept of retrocausality is limited in scope. Only in certain circumstances can we see the future influence the past. Although individual particle processes can move backward or forward in time, the universe as a whole is skewed in the forward direction, because its past endpoint was highly ordered, and its future endpoint is highly disordered. Our mortality is this asymmetry in microcosm.

http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/the-quantum-mechanics-of-fate

mycophone_emergence

mycophone, radio mycelium, myceliu, fungus, radio, sythnesis

Mycophone_emergence is an invitation for you to become the explorer of the force of technology, to enter the realm where biological and non biological are no longer anything else but a type of material that technology as dynamic force deals with and manipulates through the hands of human beings. By opening the Mycophone_emergence, a ‘biohacked’ music box, you can explore a new kind of biotech organism that makes sounds like many biological organisms do and if you pet it on its hairy mycelia fur it’s voice changes, it could be said that it starts to purr. As any other biological being it needs maintenance to exist and care to live to its highest potential.

http://mycophone.wordpress.com/mycophone_emergence/

Goodbye, Cameras

photography, technology, networked, metadata, perception, analogue, digital

In the same way that the transition from film to digital is now taken for granted, the shift from cameras to networked devices with lenses should be obvious. While we’ve long obsessed over the size of the film and image sensors, today we mainly view photos on networked screens—often tiny ones, regardless of how the image was captured—and networked photography provides access to forms of data that go beyond pixels. This information, like location, weather, or even radiation levels, can transform an otherwise innocuous photo of an empty field near Fukushima into an entirely different object. If you begin considering emerging self-metrics that measure, for example, your routes through cities, fitness level, social status, and state of mind (think Foursquare, Nike+, Facebook, and Twitter), you realize that there is a compelling universe of information waiting to be pinned to the back of each image. Once you start thinking of a photograph in those holistic terms, the data quality of stand-alone cameras, no matter how vast their bounty of pixels, seems strangely impoverished. They no longer capture the whole picture.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/goodbye-cameras.html

Is our tech making the world too complex?

Samuel Arbesman, technology, complexity, interconnectedness, algorithm, complication, machine ecolog

For centuries, humans have been creating ever-more complicated systems, from the machines we live with to the informational systems and laws that keep our global civilisation stitched together. Technology continues its fantastic pace of accelerating complexity — offering efficiencies and benefits that previous generations could not have imagined — but with this increasing sophistication and interconnectedness come complicated and messy effects that we can’t always anticipate. It’s one thing to recognise that technology continues to grow more complex, making the task of the experts who build and maintain our systems more complicated still, but it’s quite another to recognise that many of these systems are actually no longer completely understandable. We now live in a world filled with incomprehensible glitches and bugs. When we find a bug in a video game, it’s intriguing, but when we are surprised by the very infrastructure of our society, that should give us pause.

http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/is-technology-making-the-world-too-complex/

I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists…

“I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility of comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology. When I pored over those old texts, everything fell into place: the fantasy-images, the empirical material I had gathered in my practice, and the conclusions I had drawn from it. I now began to understand what these psychic contents meant when seen in historical perspective.”

–C.G. Jung [Psychology and Alchemy] (viamagictransistor)

Sacking Berlin

Berlin, Quinn Slobodian, Michelle Sterling, gentrification, development, creative class, distopia, p

So maybe this time the Golden Age really has ended. Back when Berliners hung swings in window frames, painted houses in neon colors, and planted gardens on their rooftops, none of it was supposed to pay off. In the officially Creative city, though, everything is different. The town’s whimsy and play have been branded by the SPD, sold to venture capital, and dangled before its residents via the Yummie Net.

http://thebaffler.com/past/sacking_berlin

The Internet of Plants

plants, sensing, biosensors, research, EC, cyborg plants, precision agriculture

In the not too distant future, we could see cyborg plants that tell us when they need more water, what chemicals they’ve been exposed to, and what parasites are eating their roots. These part-organic, part-electronic creations may even tell us how much pollution is in the air. And yes, they’ll plug into the network. That’s right: We’re on our way to the Internet of Plants.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/internet-plants/

Daido Moriyama: Farewell, Photography

Daido Moriyama, history, photography, essay, Gil Blank, art, deconstruction, modernism, punk

The images were rampantly blurred, grainy, scratched, and often just muddled shades of gray. The compositions were negligible, if they could be called compositions at all. Moriyama’s pictorial choices seemed to have been made completely at random, and the reproductions often included the sprocket holes at the negatives’ edges, like a film gone completely off its track. With thirty-five years’ hindsight, it’s easy to see the book as the spiritual godfather of the garage-band aesthetic that dominated commercial design in the eighties and nineties, typified by Raygun magazine and 4AD Records. The visual aesthetic of punk owes Moriyama a debt, as does every art school naïf who has ever taken it upon himself to boil his negatives; piss in the developer tray; mangle, staple, and tear at his prints; or otherwise molest the mechanics of the medium to achieve what by now are fairly standard results.

http://www.gilblank.com/texts/essays/moriyama.html

Meet the Mad Scientists Who Invented Edible Fireworks

wired, Bompas and Parr, food, experience design

People like to call Sam Bompas and Harry Parr the Willy Wonkas of the 21st century. The two Londoners do have some distinctly Wonkalian qualities: the distinct sense of style, the larger-than-life personalities and most notably, a penchant for creating fantastical, logic-defying food experiences. Like Wonka himself, Bompas and Parr once built a 10-foot waterfall flowing with chocolate and have even invented a flavor-changing chewing gum. Even so, the knee-jerk description might be selling the mad food scientists a bit short. As Bompas puts it: “Wonka was a bit of a sadist, and I’d like to think our events are a lot more open and democratic than his approach.”

http://www.wired.com/design/2014/01/two-mad-food-scientists-created-edible-fireworks/

Google Goes Evil By Funding Ted Cruz and ALEC’s Global Warming Denial

GOOG, Google, Evil, climate denial, ALEC, capital

There is simply no squaring the moral ambition of the “Don’t Be Evil” motto of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin with funding for a group that promotes “The Many Benefits of Increased Atmospheric CO2.” ALEC is exactly who Google Chairman Eric Schmidt was talking about when he said at a recent Google symposium: “You can lie about the effects of climate change, but eventually you’ll be seen as a liar.”

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/12/05/google-goes-evil-by-funding-ted-cruz-and-alecs-global-warming-denial

Crash Course on Notation in Programming Language Theory

programming, PLT, theory, notation, programming languages, computing, mathematics

This post is a crash course on the notation used in programming language theory (“PL theory” for short). For a much more thorough introduction, I recommend Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce and Semantic Engineering with PLT Redex by Felleisen, Findler, and Flatt. I’ll assume the reader is an experienced programmer but not an experienced mathematician or PL theorist. I’ll start with the most basic definitions and try to build up quickly.

http://siek.blogspot.be/2012/07/crash-course-on-notation-in-programming.html

A Preliminary Analysis of the Botany, Zoology, and Mineralogy of the Voynich Manuscript

Voynich Manuscript, botany, patabotany, mexico, catholic church, herbal

We note that the style of the drawings in the Voynich Ms. is similar to 16th century codices from Mexico (e.g., Codex Cruz-Badianus). With this prompt, we have identified a total of 37 of the 303 plants illustrated in the Voynich Ms. (roughly 12.5% of the total), the six principal animals, and the single illustrated mineral. The primary geographical distribution of these materials, identified so far, is from Texas, west to California, south to Nicaragua, pointing to a botanic garden in central Mexico, quite possibly Huaztepec (Morelos). A search of surviving codices and manuscripts from Nueva España in the 16th century, reveals the calligraphy of the Voynich Ms. to be similar to the Codex Osuna (1563-1566, Mexico City). Loan-words for the plant and animal names have been identified from Classical Nahuatl, Spanish, Taino, and Mixtec. The main text, however, seems to be in an extinct dialect of Nahuatl from central Mexico, possibly Morelos or Puebla.

http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue100/hg100-feat-voynich.html?ts=1390387253&signature=5e691a1a1ddacb988397e80e9c531795

The End of the Snowden Operation

NSA, Snowden, IC Reform, International Relations

However, yesterday President Obama ended the political debate about the Snowden Operation with his much-anticipated speech about NSA and reform, based on the recommendations of his own panel. As my colleague Tom Nichols and I have long predicted, the reform package Obama has delivered is a stinging defeat for the NSA haters. Yes, it will be more difficult for NSA analysts to access metadata, but access it they will. Yes, NSA collection against top foreign leaders will be restricted, somewhat, but Agency support to U.S. and Allied diplomacy will continue. The bottom line is that President Obama’s reforms contain no significant changes to how NSA does business as the leading foreign intelligence agency in the United States and the free world.

http://20committee.com/2014/01/18/the-end-of-the-snowden-operation/

social turkers: crowsourced dating

outsourced life, turkers, mechanical turk, IRL, social interaction

Would unbiased third party monitors be better suited to interpret situations and make decisions for the parties involved? How might augmenting our experience help us become more aware in our relationships, shift us out of normal patterns, and open us to unexpected possibilities? I am developing a system like this for myself using Amazon Mechanical Turk. During a series of dates with new people I meet on the internet, I will stream the interaction to the web using an iPhone app. Turk workers will be paid to watch the stream, interpret what is happening, and offer feedback as to what I should do or say next. This feedback will be communicated to me via text message.

http://socialturkers.com/