Writing down precise predictions is like spaced repetition: it’s brutal to do because it is almost a paradigmatic long-term activity, being wrong is physically unpleasant, and it requires 2 skills, formulating precise predictions and then actually predicting. (For spaced repetition, writing good flashcards and then actually regularly reviewing.) There are lots of exercises to try to (calibrate yourself using trivia questions obscure historical events, geography, etc.), but they only take you so far; it’s the real world near term and long term predictions that give you the most food for thought, and those require a year or three at minimum.

http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets

“Yet photography has always been more subjective than we assume, each picture a result of a series of decisions—where to stand, what lens to use, what to leave in and what to leave out of the frame. Does manipulating photographs with camera app filters make them less true? Google Street View, whose cameras take images all over the world, is now used by art photographers who sit at their computers and curate eye-catching frames to claim as their own. With surveillance cameras blanketing urban centers, have we progressed to the point where cameras don’t need photographers and photographers don’t even need cameras?”

–James Estrin, The Visual Village

Im zukünftigen Energiesystem werden die Stromverteilnetze eine zentrale Rolle spielen. Wenn der Umstieg auf Erneuerbare Energien gelingen soll, muss das Berliner Stromnetz schon heute darauf ausgerichtet werden. Außerdem erwirtschaften Stromnetze Millionengewinne. Diese sollen der Energiewende und den Bürgern zugute kommen und in der Region wirksam werden. Berlin gewinnt mit dem Stromnetz in Bürgerhand eine wertvolle Anlage der Daseinsvorsorge und der regionalen Wertschöpfung. Mit dem Kauf unseres Stromnetzes treiben wir die Demokratisierung der Energielandschaft voran, damit wir Bürgerinnen und Bürger über die zukünftige Energieversorgung mitentscheiden können.

http://www.buerger-energie-berlin.de/faq

“Computing systems are suffused through and through with the constraints of their materiality.”

–Jean-François Blanchette

The next generations of zone, as they incubated in China’s Special Economic Zones or in Middle Eastern city-states essentially swallowed the whole of the city and rendered urbanism as service industry. China’s experiment with the market was so successful that it has generated its own global urban networks of zone trading centers. For Dubai, reawakened by oil for a new chapter in global trade, the zone is a fresh form of entrepôt not unlike those in ancient episodes. No longer in the shadow of the global city as financial center (New York, London, Tokyo, Sao Paulo) the zone has now quickly overtaken it, offering a wilder more hyperbolic form that mixes off-shore financial districts, logistics parks, manufacturing facilities, educational campuses or technology villages. The zone has become the world city and the glittering mimic of Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong. Ranging from spaces of a few hectares to conurbations that are hundreds of square kilometers, the scores of zone variants—each a newly minted cocktail of urban aspiration.

http://extrastatecraft.net/Projects/Zone

Given my interest in long term content and extensive linking, link rot is an issue of deep concern to me. I need backups not just for my files1, but for the web pages I read and use - they’re all part of my exomind. It’s not much good to have an extensive essay on some topic where half the links are dead and the reader can neither verify my claims nor get context for my claims.

http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs

metanautics:

A huge cluster of jellyfish forced the Oskarshamn plant in Sweden, the site of one of the world’s largest nuclear reactors, to shut down by clogging the pipes conducting cool water to the turbines.

Operators of the plant on the Baltic coast in south-east Sweden had to scramble reactor No 3 on Sunday after tons of jellyfish were caught in the pipes.

Jellyfish force shutdown of nuclear reactor

“The majority of internet traffic to Central and South America flows through a single building in Miami, known as the Network Access Point of the Americas. Bypassing that route with a new cable would require years of work and billions of dollars, and likely would have little effect on NSA surveillance, Soghoian says. The US already has a nuclear submarine explicitly dedicated to tapping undersea internet cables, and has proven its ability to hack into the computer networks of foreign governments.”

–Cutting the cord: Brazil’s bold plan to combat the NSA | The Verge (vianew-aesthetic)

Niquille dreamed up the shirts as part of her master’s thesis in graphic design at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. FaceValue, as the thesis is titled, imagines new design solutions for the near-future, mining the ripe intersection of privacy, pattern recognition and biometrics. The shirts, custom-printed for around $65, are one of three such imaginings–a tongue-halfway-in-cheek tool for pushing back against the emerging trends of ubiquitous, computer-aided recognition. Covered in distorted faces of celebrity impersonators, they’re designed to keep Facebook’s algorithms guessing about what–or more accurately who–they’re looking at.

http://www.wired.com/design/2013/10/thwart-facebooks-creepy-auto-tagging-with-these-bizarre-t-shirts/#slideid–253221

“In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything — telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

–Frank Church on NBC, 1975.

The dollar became world key currency some 65 years ago. To be precise: during the night of July 13th and 14th, 1944. For it was during that night that the US, and even today this fact is still hardly known, clandestinely changed the wording in the documents of the Bretton Woods conference. When the conference members – stemming from 44 nations – finally signed the Agreement, they had no clue, that the US had amended the word “gold” with “and US-dollar”. It was in this manner – which the UK later described as “pure deception” – that the US-dollar became the world key currency and the US a superpower. This deception is more than just tragic: for without it the current crisis could not have developed, since the enormous disequilibrium between the US and the rest of the world which has lead into this crisis was only possible due to the special role of the US-dollar.

http://www.utnr.net/global-currency/

“I think 500 years is a reasonable span for a course to try to locate for the students, so that they can locate themselves in this arc. Courses that don’t have a 500 year arc, that aren’t teaching what it is that they are teaching in terms of a 500 year context are probably too shallow. And I think this can be just as true for very practical courses – you know, is there a way to teach a ‘how to hack a website’ workshop, or how to build an android app, with a 500 year arc of understanding what that means. How did we arrive at the possibility of asking this question and even proposing this skill.”

–Benjamin Bratton in’Ambivalent Remarks on Computation, Political Geography, Pedagogy’

“In order to be successful in the design of this legacy codebase for the generations to come we have to be willing to assign students things that are as of today illegal – with the presumption that it is the things that exits outside the legal structures will form the base of the constitutional structures to come”

–Benjamin Bratton in’Ambivalent Remarks on Computation, Political Geography, Pedagogy’

The data does tell us that climate change is happening. It does tell us that this change is linked to human behavior. It does tell us something about how certain levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases will impact our lives. And it does give us guidelines about how much we should reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and by when, in order to avoid negative consequences. What climate science doesn’t do is tell us how to value the different policies to reduce emissions, or how to deal with unintended consequences of those policies so we get the most benefits for the least harm.

http://ensia.com/voices/the-value-of-talking-about-values/

It appears the Federal Bureau of Investigation has finally cracked down on Silk Road, the underground marketplace where users could buy cocaine, heroin, meth, and more using the virtual currency Bitcoin. Journalist Brian Krebs has just published a purported copy of a complaint filed in the Southern District of New York against Ross Ulbricht, who is alleged to be the mastermind behind the site and the handle Dread Pirate Roberts. Ulbricht is being charged with narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. The site, which is only accessible through the anonymizing Tor network, has been pulled and replaced with an FBI notice. The Silk Road forums are still operating, suggesting they were hosted on a different server.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/2/4794780/fbi-seizes-underground-drug-market-silk-road-owner-indicted-in-new

The time has come: the new IPCC report is here! After several years of work by over 800 scientists from around the world, and after days of extensive discussion at the IPCC plenary meeting in Stockholm, the Summary for Policymakers was formally adopted at 5 o’clock this morning. Congratulations to all the colleagues who were there and worked night shifts. The full text of the report will be available online beginning of next week. Realclimate summarizes the key findings and shows the most interesting graphs.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/the-new-ipcc-climate-report/

I don’t know of a better example of the way the collective imagination of the modern world shifted gears when Sputnik I broke free of the atmosphere and opened the Space Age. Until then, the top of the atmosphere might as well have been a sheet of iron, as the Egyptians thought it was. (Their logic was impeccable: polished iron is blue, and so is the sky; iron is strong and heatproof, and the sky would need to be both to deal in order to support the boat named Millions of Years on which Ra the sun god does his daily commute; besides, the only iron they knew came from meteorites, which they sensibly interpreted as stray chunks of sky that had fallen to earth. Many of our theories about nature will likely seem much less reasonable from the perspective of the far future.)

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.se/2013/09/which-way-to-heaven.html

Institutional economics (old-style à la Commons; neo-institutional à la Douglass North; new institutional à la Williamson). Empirical studies of different sorts of economic institutions. Industrial organization and market structure (institutions beyond the bounds of any one formal organization). Organization theory. Theories of institutional change, formation. Difference between institutions which are products of policy and those which are products of custom. (Intermediate cases abound naturally.) Evolutionary economics. Memes. Institutional design. Centralized vs. decentralized institutions. Corruption. Distribution of power vs. formal organization. History of bureaucracy and other sorts of formal organization. (Did Europeans take civil service exams from China? How did they evolve in China?) Game-theoretic approaches. Simulations. Spontaneous formation of institutions. How, exactly, do “institutions matter” in economic development and growth?

http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/institutions.html

We should not be overly worried about somatic cell nuclear transfer as a Food Science edible technique. The abnormalities that can be expected might be delicious. Our worries stem from the fact that a large percentage of breeders may not have had the Art Historical schooling that most Academic students of Aesthetics might have had. Right now, the only type of ‘taste’ we can see embedded in cloned livestock is based on ramping up meat production and maybe designing and cloning industrial beings born with zero percent transfat. If we are spending millions of taxpayer dollars on making copies of sires whose profitability is based on 4-H tropes of beauty alone, then we are missing much of what contemporary art can lend to contemporary breeding of gastronomic novelty

http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dockets/03n0573/03N–0573-EC370-Attach–1.pdf

After untold hours in the lab experimenting with different transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging methods, the team found a new organelle inside the plant cell: the tannosome. It’s responsible for churning out tannins, the naturally occurring molecules belonging to the polyphenols class of organic chemicals.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/food-matters/2013/09/20/tannosomes-and-the-trickle-around-effect/

“Art continually escapes definition. It is promiscuous; it absorbs every kind of philosophy, embraces every ideology, exploits every technology available. It uses every kind of material, from bodies to metal to paint, from sounds to abstract ideas. Every justification for it has a counter-justification. Every rule, every attempt to legislate it, only generates exception.”

– Alison Croggon.Why Art?

In 2011, cultural industries directly employed 531 000 people, and indirectly generated a further 3.7 million jobs. Copyright industries were worth $93.2 billion to the Australian economy in 2007, with exports worth more than $500 million.2 According to its own figures, the mining industry is worth $121 billion a year to the Australian economy, only around 25 per cent more than the cultural industries. Mining employs significantly fewer people than the cultural sector: 187  400 directly, and a further 599 680 in support industries.3 The industry receives government assistance – to the tune of $700 million in the last financial year.4 In 2011–12, Australian industry as a whole – including agriculture, food manufacturing and service industries – was given an estimated $17.3 billion in combined assistance (a mixture of direct subsidies, tax breaks, tariffs and regulatory assistance).5 This doesn’t count a further $9.4 billion invested in research and development by the Australian government in the same financial year.6 In contrast, it’s probably safe to say that, when discussing arts funding, we’re talking about around $500 million annually, out of a total tax revenue in 2011–12 of $390 billion7 – that is, about 0.1 per cent of total government expenditure. (Assistance to industry, including research and development, is around 7 per cent.) The Australia Council, the major arts funding body, has a budget this year of $220 million.

http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue–212/feature-alison-croggon/

Recently a group of researchers from Harvard and Oregon State University has published the first global temperature reconstruction for the last 11,000 years – that’s the whole Holocene (Marcott et al. 2013). The results are striking and worthy of further discussion, after the authors have already commented on their results in this blog.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/paleoclimate-the-end-of-the-holocene/

With a small sample of Piddocks, wrapped in seaweed and chilled to preserve them, we began to investigate the luminiscent properties of the Pholas Dactylus. The eyes must first become accustomed to total darkness for a few minutes and then the dull greenish blue glow of the opened mollusk becomes apparent. The glow is quite strong, clearly illuminating a glass of water and surroundings, and can last perhaps one day. The blue light offers a window into the world of the Piddock, a creature which spends its whole life in darkness, shunning daylight. Hands glow blue after touching the moist body of the Piddock, and if the raw Piddock is placed in the mouth the tongue and breath also glow blue, as indicated by Pliny in ancient Roman writings about the mollusk. The taste of the raw Piddock is equally as indescribable as this strange luminescence; an extreme chemical taste, perhaps stony or mineral, deep and prehistoric, very far from the usually mild seafood experience. All forms of cooking destroy the luminescence, though the raw Piddock can be preserved by freezing.

http://www.psychogeophysics.org/wiki/doku.php?id=piddock

When it comes to the discussion of crystals, there’s a famous legend about glycerin. The story that’s frequently found in occult books goes like the following:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/961351-nine-hours-nine-persons-nine-doors/57582553

In asking all states to confine themselves to only surveil as a law enforcement tactic, and to in effect do no international intelligence work (for intelligence can clearly not operate within these bound), the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communication Surveillance ask for nothing less than the end of the Westphalian compromise and the creation of a new fundamental theory of geopolitical power and the monopoly on violence.

https://medium.com/weird-future/9b913057c28c

As technologies that facilitate State surveillance of communications advance, States are failing to ensure that laws and regulations related to communications surveillance adhere to international human rights and adequately protect the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. This document attempts to explain how international human rights law applies in the current digital environment, particularly in light of the increase in and changes to communications surveillance technologies and techniques. These principles can provide civil society groups, industry, States and others with a framework to evaluate whether current or proposed surveillance laws and practices are consistent with human rights.

https://en.necessaryandproportionate.org/text

I was commissioned by the Brisbane Writers Festival 2013 to undertake an installation at the Queensland State Library. Ultimately, it was impossible for me to complete this work, and in the interest of full disclosure and the public record, the following is an account of what has occurred, to the best of my understanding.

http://booktwo.org/statement-brisbane-drone-shadow/

Soylent Green (1973) explores the political dimensions of food substitution, industrialised food production and rapidly growing populations in a way that the coverage of Soylent (2013) has not. Soylent’s invention was borne of Rhinehart’s desire not to have to clean his dishes after he had eaten, and this desire - of a young, employed male in California who finds no pleasure in the purchase, preparation or consumption of food - is not necessarily the desire (or need) of other populations. Abstracting the culture of food into the nutritional qualities of fuel is not just an efficiency process; it imposes a version of reality where eating is no longer a satisfying, social, even sensual activity to be shared with friends and loved ones.

http://arcfinity.tumblr.com/post/60062112327/georgina-voss-performs-a-literary-heimlich-manoeuvre

In a “tipping” model, each node in a social network, representing an individual, adopts a property or behavior if a certain number of his incoming neighbors currently exhibit the same. In viral marketing, a key problem is to select an initial “seed” set from the network such that the entire network adopts any behavior given to the seed. Here we introduce a method for quickly finding seed sets that scales to very large networks. Our approach finds a set of nodes that guarantees spreading to the entire network under the tipping model. After experimentally evaluating 31 real-world networks, we found that our approach often finds seed sets that are several orders of magnitude smaller than the population size and outperform nodal centrality measures in most cases.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2963

Programming is complicated. Different programs have different abstraction levels, domains, platforms, longevity, team sizes, etc ad infinitum. There is something fundamentally different between the detailed instructions that goes into, say, computing a checksum and the abstractions when defining the flow of data in any medium-sized system. I think that the divide between coding the details and describing the flow of a program is so large that a programming language could benefit immensely from keeping them conceptually separate. This belief has led me to design a new programming language - Glow - that has this separation at its core.

http://fendrich.se/blog/2013/09/03/big-programming/

Typographers seem eager to dismiss wider spaces as some sort of fad, either something ugly that originated with typewriters, or some sort of Victorian excess that lasted for a few brief decades and quickly petered out. But this is simply not the case. As we will explore presently, the large space following a period was an established convention for English-language publishers (and many others in Europe) in the 1700s, if not before, and it did not truly begin to fade completely until around 1950.

http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324

“A well-wrought piece of design fiction should raise if-then-but questions like a shotgun blast raises birds from a field”

–Will Wiles, ‘Review: United Micro Kingdoms’ (2013)

“Kafka, Kerouac, and Wozniak had one advantage over us: they worked on machines that did not readily do more than one thing at a time, easily yielding to our conflicting desires. And, while distraction was surely available—say, by reading the newspaper, or chatting with friends—there was a crucial difference. Today’s machines don’t just allow distraction; they promote it. The Web calls us constantly, like a carnival barker, and the machines, instead of keeping us on task, make it easy to get drawn in—and even add their own distractions to the mix. In short: we have built a generation of “distraction machines” that make great feats of concentrated effort harder instead of easier.”

–The Problem With Multitasking : The New Yorker (viaphotographsonthebrain)

“From here on, the alchemy, the tinkering, the photography would be relegated to day jobs of one kind or another. The nights, the flights and journeys proper to night, would be dedicated to the Mysteries of Time.”

–Thomas Pynchon. Against the Day

Some of this fear results from imperfect risk perception. We’re bad at accurately assessing risk; we tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange, and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar, and common ones. This leads us to believe that violence against police, school shootings, and terrorist attacks are more common and more deadly than they actually are – and that the costs, dangers, and risks of a militarized police, a school system without flexibility, and a surveillance state without privacy are less than they really are.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/our_newfound_fe.html

By and large, graphic design students bring a laptop to school, and create their work using digital software tools. This hard- and software represent a technological and cultural heritage that is seldomly questioned, and a potential that goes unexploited. Using free and open source software and engaging in its culture provides an alternative by making a design practice possible with a more intimate and experimental relation to its toolbox. Beyond the implications for design practice, the culture of free and open source software challenges traditional education paradigms because knowledge is exchanged outside institutional borders, and participants move between roles easily (teacher, student, developer, user). Following from their series of workshops and Print Parties, OSP proposes a summer school experiment. A first try to move across the conventional school model towards a space where the relationship to learning is mediated by graphical software.

http://relearn.be/

We’ve treated ’scale’ like an unalloyed good for so long that it seems peculiar to question it. There are plenty of reasons for wanting to scale businesses and services up to make more things for more people in more areas; perhaps the strongest is that things usually get cheaper and quicker to provide. The problem is that scale has a cost, and that’s being unable to respond to the wants and needs of unique individuals. Theoretically, that’s not a problem in a free market, but of course, we don’t have a free market, and we certainly don’t have a free market when it comes to politics and media.

http://mssv.net/2011/11/20/does-it-scale/

Although his critique of Buddhism is somewhat uninformed, Zizek does offer, in his own way, a good insight into the danger of misunderstanding Buddhist practice and the techniques of mindfulness altogether. What fascinates me is that his critique parallels – in the language of cultural theory – the personal wariness that most beginning meditators have about the practice of meditation, especially regarding 1) how mindfulness actually works, 2) what acceptance really means, and 3) how genuine transformation comes about.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ethan-nichtern/radical-buddhism_b_671972.html

“But don’t you need a subject to experience this object? Isn’t this an infinite regress?” If you have this worry you are simply confused by the traditional presentation of objects as “for” some subject. Buddhism argues that this is not simply a philosophical issue but is endemic to existing as such (samsara). Simple yes?

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.be/2010/09/object-oriented-buddhism.html

Agamben argues that the boundary which separates the human and the animal is at best a tenuous one. As such, what he means by ‘the open’ is that moment during which the human is reconciled with the animal in the state of what Heidegger terms ‘profound boredom’. Against the backdrop of the ‘anthropological machine’ that produces an anthropocentric history of being, Agamben advances the thesis that the human and the animal are essentially indistinguishable, despite the discursive production of these figures as distinct entities. As a result, the discursive production of the human becomes politicised (what Agamben refers to as ‘bios’, the political life of the human or ‘qualified life’) and it is set in contrast to the anthropocentric definition of nonhuman life as worthless and disposable (as ‘zoe’ or ‘bare-life’)

http://technepoiesis12.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/agamben-notes/

The radio signal that occupies 4625 kHz has reportedly been broadcasting since the late 1970s. The earliest known recording of it is dated 1982. Ever since curious owners of shortwave radios first discovered the signal, it has broadcast a repeating buzzing noise. Every few years, the buzzer stops, and a Russian voice reads a mixture of numbers and Russian names. A typical message came hours before Christmas day, 1997: “Ya UVB-76, Ya UVB-76. 180 08 BROMAL 74 27 99 14. Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 7 4 2 7 9 9 1 4”

http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/4716/a-russian-enigma/

From the vantage point of our own auditory world, with its jets, jackhammers, HVAC systems, truck traffic, cellphones, horns, decibel-bloated restaurants and gyms on acoustical steroids, Schopenhauer’s mid-19th century complaints sound almost quaint. His biggest gripe of all was the “infernal cracking” of coachmen’s whips. (If you think a snapping line of rawhide’s a problem, buddy, try the Rumbler Siren.) But if noise did shatter thought in the past, has more noise in more places further diffused our cognitive activity?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/opinion/sunday/im-thinking-please-be-quiet.html?pagewanted=2&_r=5&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130825&pagewanted=all&

During the past decade, the NSA has secretly worked to gain access to virtually all communications entering, leaving, or going through the country. A key reason, according to the draft of a top secret NSA inspector general’s report leaked by Snowden, is that approximately one third of all international telephone calls in the world enter, leave, or transit the United States. “Most international telephone calls are routed through a small number of switches or ‘chokepoints’ in the international telephone switching system en route to their final destination,” says the report. “The United States is a major crossroads for international switched telephone traffic.” At the same time, according to the 2009 report, virtually all Internet communications in the world pass through the US. For example, the report notes that during 2002, less than one percent of worldwide Internet bandwidth—i.e., the international link between the Internet and computers—“was between two regions that did not include the United States.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/nsa-they-know-much-more-you-think/?pagination=false

Nature’s game of intimidation and imitation comes full circle in the waters of Indonesia, where scientists have recorded for the first time an association between the black-marble jawfish (Stalix cf. histrio) and the mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus).

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120104153747.htm

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Speculative design generates proposals that, rather than problem solving for our current state, which is much of the focus of traditional design, look to digest the large, complex and ambiguous issues related to our futures. It uses rigorous research to first understand and then rewire different information, experts and emerging technologies to turn these complexities into understandable narratives that allow a kind of design for debate. The outcomes intentionally trigger a user to go beyond traditional need, solution, and consumption, and to question, consider, and speculate. In this way changes and findings that would normally seem irrelevant or overwhelming are teased out into scenarios, objects and services. This is achieved by breaking down unfathomable issues and making them more emotionally approachable. The results are ‘cultural prototypes’ in a way.

http://www.digital-development-debates.org/issues/11-youth/education-employment/frontiers-fringe-and-farmification/

Dystopias make for boring futurism. While it’s certainly true that one can tell a compelling dramatic story about the end of the world, as a mechanism of foresight, apocaphilia is trite at best, counter-productive at worst. Yet world-ending scenarios are easy to find, especially coming from advocates for various social-economic-global changes. As one of those advocates, I’m well aware of the need to avoid taking the easy route of wearing a figurative sign reading The End Is Nigh. We want people to take the risks we describe seriously, so there is an understandable temptation to stretch a challenging forecast to its horrific extremes–but ultimately, it’s a bad idea.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1682109/the-end-of-the-world-isnt-as-likely-as-humans-fighting-back

Selbst die Zentrale der Vereinten Nationen in New York wurde vom US-Geheimdienst NSA abgehört, obwohl ein Abkommen genau das untersagt. Auch das US-Konsulat in Frankfurt diente als Lauschposten.

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/nsa-hoerte-zentrale-der-vereinte-nationen-in-new-york-ab-a–918421.html

The classified documents, which SPIEGEL has seen, demonstrate how systematically the Americans target other countries and institutions like the EU, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna and the UN. They show how the NSA infiltrated the Europeans’ internal computer network between New York and Washington, used US embassies abroad to intercept communications and eavesdropped on video conferences of UN diplomats. The surveillance is intensive and well-organized – and it has little or nothing to do with counter-terrorism.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-nsa-documents-show-how-the-us-spies-on-europe-and-the-un-a–918625.html

This is how we lose our rights. Not overnight in one fell swoop, but gradually, after getting worn down again and again, and after hundreds of mini-panic-attacks, and with ever-ratcheting procedural changes that effectively invalidate the assurances and safeguards that we’re given. I give up. The terrorists have won. I’m sad and I’m angry, but the perpetual wearing-down works. I won’t be opting out again.

http://orenhazi.com/defeated.html

An antifragile way of life is all about finding a way to gain from the inevitable disorder of life. To not only bounce back when things don’t go as planned, but to get stronger, smarter, and better at continuing as a result of running into this disorder.

https://medium.com/better-humans/c02337782a89

A directory of direct links to delete your account from web services.

http://justdelete.me/

In the dusty red earth of Western Australia, robot trucks haul iron ore. The trucks themselves weigh about 500 tons when loaded — they are truly massive. They operate more or less on their own, navigating mining roads connecting the sprawling Pilbara iron mines with a guidance system provided by global positioning satellites, radars and lasers. It’s part of $13 billion mining operation by Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest mining firms.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/bed4b2b5a70a

When Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) was thirteen, the US government announced it had launched “Operation Infinite Justice”. Operation Infinite Justice sought to punish the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 attacks, destroy Al Qaeda, and end the reign of the Taliban. Operation Infinite Justice was renamed “Operation Enduring Freedom” after protests from Islamic scholars, who argued that God, not the US government, was the arbiter of justice. But freedom, it seemed, was something the United States could give and take away. When Manning was fourteen, the Bush administration announced that detainees in Guantanamo did not deserve protection under the Geneva conventions and that torture was justified. When Manning was fifteen, the US invaded Iraq in response to fabricated reports that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. When Manning was sixteen, US soldiers tortured and sodomised prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. When Manning was seventeen, a movement emerged to prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes. Nothing really came of it. When Manning was nineteen, she joined the army.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/08/2013823123822366392.html

In honor of Manfred Mancx, Charles Stross’ venture altruist/seagull/submissive/catspaw/posthuman protagonist in Accelerando – who tries to patent six impossible things before breakfast, or something like that – here are a couple of possibilities to start things out.

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/01/27/concluding-unscientific-posthuman-to-the-singularitarian-fragments-an-agalmic-pathetic-dialectic-a-mimic-extropic-discourse/

The Kalman Filter provides an efficient recursive estimator for the unobserved state of a linear discrete time dynamical system in the presence of measurement error. Kalman (1960) first introduced the method in the Engineering literature, but it can be understood in the context of Bayesian inference.

http://jblevins.org/notes/kalman

It is not widely known that Tarkovsky, whose films often seem to be composed as a montage of still photos, in a period effectively took photos with a Polaroid camera. These photos, taken at home and in Italy, in spite of all their technical imperfections bear witness to the same way of seeing and visual world as the great films.

http://riowang.blogspot.be/2010/06/tarkovskys-polaroids.html

firstmileeconomics:

This photo perfectly illustrates for me how Abstractable knowhow of the 20th century is designed to be detachable from its situation and how Contextual knowhow operates with a fundamentally different logic, economy and effectiveness -  born from embedded intelligence, agency and action. 

“Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making….Using my ecological reasoning, someone who procrastinates is not irrational; it is his environment that is irrational. And the psychologist or economist calling him irrational is the one who is beyond irrational.”

–“Antifragile" Nassim Nicholas Taleb

At the time, Jude and I were contracted to write a novel titled How to Mutate and Take Over the World. I wanted the fiction to contain the truth. I wanted to tell people how creative hackers could do it — mutate and take over the world — by the end of the decade. Not knowing many of those details ourselves, we threw down a challenge on various hacker boards and in the places where extropians gathered to share their superhuman fantasies. “Take on a character,” we said, “and let that character mutate and/or take over.” The results were vague and unsatisfying. These early transhumanists didn’t actually know how to mutate, and the hackers couldn’t actually take over the world. It seemed that we were asking for too much too soon.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/7/4036040/cypherpunks-julian-assange-wikileaks-encryption-surveillance-dystopia

For one British university, what began as a time-saving exercise ended in disgrace when a computer model set up to streamline its admissions process exposed - and then exacerbated - gender and racial discrimination. As detailed here in the British Medical Journal, staff at St George’s Hospital Medical School decided to write an algorithm that would automate the first round of its admissions process. The formulae used historical patterns in the characteristics of candidates whose applications were traditionally rejected to filter out new candidates whose profiles matched those of the least successful applicants. By 1979 the list of candidates selected by the algorithms was a 90-95% match for those chosen by the selection panel, and in 1982 it was decided that the whole initial stage of the admissions process would be handled by the model. Candidates were assigned a score without their applications having passed a single human pair of eyes, and this score was used to determine whether or not they would be interviewed. Quite aside from the obvious concerns that a student would have upon finding out a computer was rejecting their application, a more disturbing discovery was made. The admissions data that was used to define the model’s outputs showed bias against females and people with non-European-looking names.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/aug/14/problem-with-algorithms-magnifying-misbehaviour

To paraphrase the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne: on a continent where attempts to improve humanity’s lot are in crisis, meaning comes from the future. A group of young African artists, black and white grandchildren of the independence generation, have started a cultural revolution by moving into science fiction, until recently the preserve of western imaginations. The “invisible men” of the 3D Fiction collective, linked online and through pan-African magazines, are exploring “the possibilities of shared writing on the future”, and say “the future described in a [sci-fi] story engenders a new present, which challenges our own”

http://mondediplo.com/2013/06/13scifi

In thinking about system design, it’s important to avoid the temptation to develop detailed top down blueprints for systems. Taleb observes that “if about everything top-down fragilizes and blocks antifragility and growth, everything bottom-up thrives under the right amount of stress and disorder.” Nevertheless, there are certain design principles that emerge from Taleb’s work that can help reduce the fragility of the systems we design.

http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2013/04/getting-stronger-through-stress-making-black-swans-work-for-you.html

“As Weaver correctly remarked: the word information relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say. The mathematical theory of communication deals with the carriers of information, symbols and signals, not with information itself. That is, information is the measure of your freedom of choice when you select a message.”

–Floridi, Luciano.Information: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. (viacarvalhais)

How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/against-transparency

The Gini Coefficient, which can measure inequality in any set of numbers, has been in use for a century, but until recently it rarely left the halls of academia. Its one-number simplicity endeared it to political scientists and economists; its usual subject—economic inequality—made it popular with sociologists and policy makers. The Gini Coefficient has been the sort of workhorse metric that college freshmen learn about in survey courses and some PhD statisticians devote a lifetime to. It’s been so useful, so adaptable, that its strange history has survived only as a footnote: the coefficient was developed in 1912 by Corrado Gini, an Italian sociologist and statistician—who also wrote a paper called “The Scientific Basis of Fascism.”

http://www.psmag.com/magazines/january-february–2013/gini-coefficient-index-poverty-wealth-income-equality–51413/

Hieroglyph is a space for writers, scientists, artists and engineers to collaborate on creative, ambitious visions of our near future.

http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/

So, hacker culture is kind of at a crossroads. For a long time it was totally cool that, you know what, I don’t really want to be political, because I just like to reverse code and it’s a lot of fun, and I don’t really have time for politics cause I spend thirteen hours a day looking at Shell code and socialism takes too long. That was great for a while, but we don’t get to be apolitical anymore. Because If you’re doing security work, if you’re doing development work and you are apolitical, then you are aiding the existing centralizing structure. If you’re doing security work and you are apolitical, you are almost certainly working for an organization that exists in a great part to prop up existing companies and existing power structures. Who here has worked for a a security consultancy? Not that many people, ok. I don’t know anybody who has worked for a security consultancy where that consultancy has not done work for someone in the defense industry. There are probably a few, and I guarantee you that those consultancies that have done no work that is defense industry related, have taken an active political position, that we will not touch anything that is remotely fishy. If you’re apolitical, you’re aiding the enemy.

https://noisysquare.com/ethics-and-power-in-the-long-war-eleanor-saitta-dymaxion/

In Yugoslavia in the 1980s, computers were a rare luxury. A ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 could easily cost a month’s salary, and that’s if you could even get through the tough importation laws. Then in 1983, while on holiday in Risan, Voja Antonić dreamt up plans for a new computer, a people’s machine that could be built at home for a fraction of the cost of foreign imports. The Galaksija was born, and with it a computer revolution.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013–07–30-the-story-of-yugoslavias-diy-computer-revolution

diybioftw:

Biological protocols are terse, telegraphic recipes that document common wetlab tasks, for instance, sorting DNA molecules by length via gel electrophoresis, growing a liquid culture of E coli, or extracting plasmid DNA from E coli.

Protocols are generally written and shared in plain text…

DIYBIOFTW: structured protocols

In this article, I’ll demonstrate a method for modifying a naval telecommunications dish to track moving targets in the sky, such as those in Low Earth Orbit. My dish happily sits in Tennessee, while I direct it using my laptop or cellphone here in Europe. It can also run unattended, tracking moving targets and looking for downlink channels.

http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.be/2013/07/hillbilly-tracking-of-low-earth-orbit.html

Resting-state activity is important, if the amount of energy devoted to it is any indication. Blood flow to the brain during rest is typically just 5–10% lower than during task-based experiments1. And studying the brain at rest should help to show how the active brain works. Research on resting-state networks is helping to map the brain’s intrinsic connections by showing, for example, which areas of the brain prefer to talk to which other areas, and how those patterns might differ in disease.

http://www.nature.com/news/neuroscience-idle-minds–1.11440

Regional cuisines often differ substantially in their cooking methods, their food preparation and above all their ingredients. But they can also be closely related. So here’s an interesting question: what factors determine the links between regional cuisines?

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/517401/food-network-analysis-reveals-patterns-behind-chinese-regional-cuisines/

Food occupies a central position in every culture and it is therefore of great interest to understand the evolution of food culture. The advent of the World Wide Web and online recipe repositories has begun to provide unprecedented opportunities for data-driven, quantitative study of food culture. Here we harness an online database documenting recipes from various Chinese regional cuisines and investigate the similarity of regional cuisines in terms of geography and climate. We found that the geographical proximity, rather than climate proximity is a crucial factor that determines the similarity of regional cuisines. We develop a model of regional cuisine evolution that provides helpful clues to understand the evolution of cuisines and cultures.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.3185

The cultural diversity of culinary practice, as illustrated by the variety of regional cuisines, raises the question of whether there are any general patterns that determine the ingredient combinations used in food today or principles that transcend individual tastes and recipes. We introduce a flavor network that captures the flavor compounds shared by culinary ingredients. Western cuisines show a tendency to use ingredient pairs that share many flavor compounds, supporting the so-called food pairing hypothesis. By contrast, East Asian cuisines tend to avoid compound sharing ingredients. Given the increasing availability of information on food preparation, our data-driven investigation opens new avenues towards a systematic understanding of culinary practice.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6074

Seven previous studies had already shown that vitamins increased the risk of cancer and heart disease and shortened lives. Still, in 2012, more than half of all Americans took some form of vitamin supplements. What few people realize, however, is that their fascination with vitamins can be traced back to one man. A man who was so spectacularly right that he won two Nobel Prizes and so spectacularly wrong that he was arguably the world’s greatest quack.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitamin-myth-why-we-think-we-need-supplements/277947/

Science is an exercise in curiosity about nature. It is a process. It sometimes involves complex and costly apparatus, or the resources of giant institutes. Sometimes it involves looking at ants in an ant farm, and knowing some clever math. Many people are gobsmacked by the technological gizmos used to do science. They think the giant S&M dungeons of tokomaks and synchro-cyclotrons are science. Those aren’t science; they’re tools. The end product; the insights into nature -that is what is important. Professors Ryabko and Reznikova did something a kid could understand the implications of, but no kid could actually do. The fact that they did it at all indicates they have the child-like curiosity and love for nature that is the true spirit of scientific enquiry.

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/on-the-empire-of-the-ants/

The Story So Far 77: “Something is going to happen in 77 days.” 76: “I’ve been trying to tell you something for 1,183 days.” 75: “I’m awake now. Things are clearing up. I’m not saying the words anymore.” 74: “I’ve got a minute, let me tell you what I think is going on.” 73: “Tension between the districts has spiked in the last few months.” 72: “You can see it in the markets. Everyone’s ready for a storm.” 71: “They’re singing a new song in the streets of the zone.” 70: “I have plenty of information to keep me company.” 69: “No one is ready. He watches the market.” 68: “I’m not talking about a disaster, I’m talking about a love triangle.” 67: “We fell into the jungle for a summer of dollar/duller crime.” 66: “We were young heroes, gorgeous liars.” 65: “Turn off the lights and drink a cold glass of water.” 64: “No one is singing, everyday’s the same.”

http://intothedeep77.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/sixty-four-days.html

As you can see the theories regarding PB are very varied but in other ways connected to each other. The theories that have stood out to me the most out of all of them is the theory of a larger Snowden conspiracy and some sort of long planned attack, both of which could be incredibly important as well as damaging. References to video games have also been made along the way in a number of videos which I will also cover later. As well as this I will write another post later on the Countdown Site as a whole, and it’s connections to PB and the rumoured “Elixir of Life”.

http://intothedeep77.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/theories.html

The central, unifying theme of the institute was time. Not physical time, but biological and psychological time. How does our brain perceive physical time? What is the structure of perceived time? What regulates biological oscillations in humans, animals and even algae? Can environmental cues modify temporal perception? The close proximity of so many disciplines made for fascinating coffee-break discussions, forcing us to re-evaluate our own research findings in the light of the discoveries made in neighboring labs and inspired us to become more creative in our experimental design.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/07/three-seconds-poems-cubes-and-the-brain.html#more

Human knowledge expresses itself in three different modes, i.e. as explicit, semantic or verbal knowledge, as implicit, tacit or intuitive knowledge, and as visual, pictorial or episodic knowledge. To refer to knowledge only as „explicit knowledge“ would neglect the other modes of knowledge that are of equal importance for higher cognition. Unifying frames of the different modes of knowledge are the aesthetiic principle on a formal level and the mimetic principle on the level of reference.

http://www.ernst-poeppel.de/

Primecoin is the first scientific computing cryptocurrency, a project derived from Bitcoin but with novel non-hashcash proof-of-work that mines prime numbers.

https://github.com/primecoin/primecoin/wiki

Then from some dreadful tagged spot in geolocative extradimensionality came a seething, writhing cavalcade of immaterial shapes. These were the ghastly, tentacular exudations of a Dark Energy force in the universe—the multiplex arms of a face-sucking vampire squid, the dark lord of the mayhem around us that withered every mortal thing it could touch.

http://boingboing.net/2013/07/16/bruce-sterling-from-beyond.html

“Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists”

–Iain M Banks

“There was probably something more to this account than just someone being arty on Soundcloud, and it clearly had something to do with experimenting with some deeper-level synthesis software… But so fragmentary and surreal were the leavings on the page that it even crossed my mind that an artificial intelligence of some kind might be wholly or partly behind it, an unpersuasive spambot gone amok like the celebrated Twitter account @horse_ebooks. Perhaps assuming someone is a spambot is the 21st century equivalent of assuming, as in Jandek’s case, that someone has a mental illness.”

–My favourite musicologistAdam Harper writing forElectronic Beatsmentions the emergence of bot-like Soundcloud accounts, and the mystery and aesthetic appreciation of that approach to making and sharing music. In this quote he is referring to the music ofPepsi 7up. (viaalgopop)

“As the German evolutionist Gustav Jager argued in 1869, religion can be seen as “a weapon in the [Darwinian] struggle for survival.” As Jager’s language suggests, none of this should be construed to suggest that religion is—on the whole—a good thing. There are good things about religion, including the way its ethical teachings bind people into more harmonious collectives. But there is an obvious dark side to religion, too: the way it is so readily weaponized. Religion draws coreligionists together, and it drives those of different faiths apart.”

– Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal, How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. (viacarvalhais)

The digitization of our economy will bring with it a new generation of radical economic ideologies, of which Bitcoin is arguably the first. For those with assets, technological savvy, and a sense of adventure, the state is the enemy and a cryptographic currency is the solution. But for those more focused on the decline of the middle classes, the collapse of the entry-level jobs market, and the rise of free culture, the state is an ally, and the solution might look something like an unconditional basic income. Before I explain why this concept is going to be creeping into the political debate across the developed world, let me spell out how a system like this would look

http://simulacrum.cc/2013/07/10/three-trends-that-push-us-towards-an-unconditional-basic-income/

The conventional view of Machiavelli is as an unscrupulous amoralist, for whom, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, the only ends of social and political life ‘are the attainment and holding down of power’. Moral rules are merely ‘technical rules about the means to these ends’. Because Machiavelli viewed all humans as inherently corrupt, so ‘we may break a promise or violate an agreement at any time if it is in our own interests to do so, for the presumption is that, since all men are wicked, those with whom you have contracted may at any time break their promises if it is in their interest.’

https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/on-machiavelli/

A new pilot study at Panthbadodiya could significantly change living conditions for the poor, and India’s approach to fighting poverty. The village is taking part in the Madhya Pradesh Unconditional Cash Transfer Initiative, a project run by the Self Employed Women’s Association (Sewa; a trade union that has defended the rights of women with low incomes in India for 40 years), with subsidies from Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund) India. The research director, Sarath Dewala, explained: “The experiment involves giving individuals a small sum of money, at regular intervals, as a supplement to all other forms of income, and observing what happens to their families if this sum is given unconditionally.”

http://mondediplo.com/2013/05/04income

There are several aspects to this post. Partly, it’s about what material explorations look like when performed with data. Partly, it’s about the role of code as a tool to explore data. We don’t write about code much on the site, because we’re mainly interested in the products we produce and the invention involved in them, but it’s sometimes important to talk about processes and tools, and this, I feel, is one of those times. At the same time, as well as talking about technical matters, I wanted to talk a little about what the act of doing this work feels like.

http://berglondon.com/blog/2009/10/23/toiling-in-the-data-mines-what-data-exploration-feels-like/

“Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.”

–J.G. Ballard, Ambit magazine, 1967 (viadarklyeuphoric)

In just ten months, the United States managed to transform an 82 year-old Catholic nun and two pacifists from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protestors accused of misdemeanor trespassing into federal felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism. Now in jail awaiting sentencing for their acts at an Oak Ridge, TN nuclear weapons production facility, their story should chill every person concerned about dissent in the US.

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15–7

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople. That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

http://www.marco.org/2013/07/03/lockdown

Citizen deliberative councils, participatory budgeting, the Occupy movement’s consensus decision making: These are all experiments in more participatory forms of democracy. Technologies can support these types of experiments, from the keypad and CoVision technologies used by AmericaSpeaks in deliberative dialog and polling to the geographic information systems used by the Madrona platform for participatory spatial planning. With the rise of the German Pirate Party (see NYT and NPR reports), so-called liquid democracy platforms for proxy voting (or delegated voting) are finally getting some real-world testing and development.

http://www.solvingforpattern.org/2012/10/02/proxy-voting-liquid-democracy/

Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system. Storm makes it easy to reliably process unbounded streams of data, doing for realtime processing what Hadoop did for batch processing. Storm is simple, can be used with any programming language, and is a lot of fun to use

http://storm-project.net/

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness – and that is not the nature of a human group.

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

SciFoo is the brainchild of O'Reilly, Nature publishing group and Google. It takes place every year at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in Silicon Valley, California, where around 200 of the world’s preeminent scientists gather together. Nobel Laureates rub shoulders with rocket engineers, roboticists, angel investors, science writers and the odd science celebrity.

http://decelerator.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/and-everything-is-possible-again.html

To commemorate this famous event, commonly known as the mother of all demos, SRI held a 40th anniversary celebration at Stanford today. As a small tribute to the innovative ideas that made up the demo, it is befitting to mention some of the programming languages that were used by Engelbart’s team. A few were mentioned in passing in the event today, making me realize that they are not that widely known.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3122

If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart’s design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart’s intent. Engelbart hated our present-day systems. If you truly want to understand NLS, you have to forget today. Forget everything you think you know about computers. Forget that you think you know what a computer is. Go back to 1962. And then read his intent. The least important question you can ask about Engelbart is, “What did he build?” By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to admire him, to stand in awe of his achievements, to worship him as a hero. But worship isn’t useful to anyone. Not you, not him. The most important question you can ask about Engelbart is, “What world was he trying to create?” By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to create that world yourself.

http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/

By “augmenting human intellect” we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by “complex situations” we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers–whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment–3906.html