{ US Drone fleet can keep tabs on the movements of Americans, far from the battlefields. And it can hold data on them for 90 days — studying it to see if the people it accidentally spied upon are actually legitimate targets of domestic surveillance. | Wired | full story }
{ MCA tribute at the airport | Chris Chapman }
I’m what they call a media ecologist, so I believe in media environments — both explicit ones and implicit ones. So it’s like the lightbulb is a media environment, right? You turn on the lightbulb, and you have a different environment because of that medium. But print is a media environment that encourages certain ways of looking at the world. Television changes us. Internet is a media environment. Somehow our media environment, combined with our economic environment, can really amplify one another’s effects in dangerous ways.
Way back in the mid-1990s — when Wired announced that we’re living in an attention economy, when everyone came up with these metrics to measure eyeball hours and the “stickiness” of websites — there was this competition to get our attention. Parallel to that is the sudden emergence of all these attention disorders and new prescriptions for Ritalin. So I’m thinking, we’re living in an attention economy, in which it’s been declared by Wall Street that the one commodity we’ve got to extend in order to make more money is human attention. And then we start drugging our children to pay more attention. I can’t help but worry. Not that there’s a specific conspiracy — Oh, let’s drug the children so they pay more attention — but rather, we’re living in a world where the brunt of our technological know-how is being spent on maintaining attention. Kids start to show these defense mechanisms against paying attention.
{ Douglas Rushkoff interviewed by Samantha Hinds | Continue reading }
photo { Christian Patterson }
Spain is in a complete economic crisis. Its unemployment rate of 24.4 percent is higher than the U.S. unemployment rate during the worst of the Great Depression. And there’s no Spanish New Deal waiting around the corner to turn things around. The prolonged spell of mass unemployment is going to degrade workers’ abilities and prevent young people from gaining skills. The most capable and daring Spaniards will emigrate abroad, and Spanish firms will (rationally) fail to invest in improving the productivity of their workers. This bleak outlook will make investors more reluctant to loan euros to the Spanish government, which will then force more rounds of tax hikes and budget cuts, which will further crush the Spanish economy. A country that was booming a few years ago now looks doomed.
But perhaps there is a way out, one suggested by the recent experience of Argentina, a nation that’s currently enjoying full employment.
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz (September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was a Russian-American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an “abstract painter.” […]
A rise of Nazi sympathy in the United States heightened Rothko’s fears of anti-Semitism, and in January 1940, he abbreviated his name from “Marcus Rothkowitz” to “Mark Rothko.” The name “Roth,” a common abbreviation, had become, as a result of its commonality, identifiably Jewish, therefore he settled upon “Rothko.” […]
He apparently stopped painting altogether for the length of 1940. […] The most crucial philosophical influence on Rothko in this period was Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. […]
The year 1946 saw the creation of Rothko’s transitional “multiform” paintings. The term “multiform” has been applied by art critics; this word was never used by Rothko himself, yet it is an accurate description of these paintings. […] For Rothko, these blurred blocks of various colors, devoid of landscape or human figure, let alone myth and symbol, possessed their own life force. They contained a “breath of life” he found lacking in most figurative painting of the era. […]
By the mid 1950’s however, close to a decade after the completion of the first “multiforms,” Rothko began to employ dark blues and greens; for many critics of his work this shift in colors was representative of a growing darkness within Rothko’s personal life. […]
In the spring of 1968, Rothko was diagnosed with a mild aortic aneurysm (defect in the arterial wall, that gradually leads to outpouching of the vessel and at times frank rupture). Ignoring doctor’s orders, Rothko continued to drink and smoke heavily, avoided exercise, and maintained an unhealthy diet. However, he did follow the medical advice given not to paint pictures larger than a yard in height, and turned his attention to smaller, less physically strenuous formats, including acrylics on paper. Meanwhile, Rothko’s marriage had become increasingly troubled, and his poor health and impotence resulting from the aneurysm compounded his feeling of estrangement in the relationship. Rothko and his wife Mell separated on New Year’s Day 1969, and he moved into his studio.
On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko’s assistant, found the artist in his kitchen, lying dead on the floor in front of the sink, covered in blood. He had sliced his arms with a razor found lying at his side. During autopsy it was discovered he had also overdosed on anti-depressants.
artwork { Mark Rothko, Orange Red Yellow, 1961 | sold for $86,882,500 yesterday at Christie’s, a new auction record for post-war art }
Modernity became obsessed with analysis and the elimination of vague, ambiguous, or contradictory ideas. We fell almost completely under its sway and came to imagine that the picture of reality that such thinking provided gave us the best way to understand our world and our place in it.
It was as if we had finally found our way out of the cave and into the kind of light that Plato had thought existed with the Platonic forms. It appeared that modern thinkers had found their way out of the shadowy and mysterious realm of our actual experience and found the kind of certainty that Plato had sought.
Today, however, we are able to see that from a very different perspective because of what we know concerning the human brain. We now know that as appealing as such certainty is, it merely represents one way that the human brain is capable of thinking. Instead of the moving picture of our actual experience, we are capable of ideas that represent snap shots, which make the distances, perspectives, and relations that we actually experience appear fixed and give us the kind of clear and distinct ideas that we crave.
In the seventh book of the Republic, Plato sets forth his famous allegory of the cave. The traditional understanding interpreted it as Plato arguing that both becoming and being were real because there were two different worlds or realms of reality. One was the world of sense-data, which the Pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus argued was purely a matter of becoming. In this world, nothing ever exists in a pure state of being but is always becoming something else.
Plato however, claimed that there was another world where things did exist in a pure state of being. Parmenides and several other Pre-Socratic philosophers had long claimed that the world of which Heraclitus spoke was an illusory world produced by a naïve trust in our unreliable senses and that in fact reason showed us that only being truly existed and all becoming and change was illusory. Plato agreed with both Heraclitus and Parmenides: he believed that the world of our sense data was real and not merely illusory, but there was also a world of pure being - the parallel universe that Plato would come to describe as the world of the forms.
photo { Steve Schapiro, Samuel Beckett Looking at Parrot, New York, 1964 }
From the year 2003 and working backwards to the beginning of human history, we generated, according to IBM’s calculations, five exabytes–that’s five billion gigabytes–of information.
By last year, we were cranking out that much data every two days.
By next year, predicts Turek, we’ll be doing it every 10 minutes. […]
It’s the latest example of technology outracing our capacity to use it. In this case, we haven’t begun to catch up with our ability to capture information, which is why a favorite trope of management pundits these days is that the future belongs to companies and governments that can make sense of all the data they’re collecting, preferably in real time.
related { The future of media on mobile devices isn’t with applications but with the Web }
This system is enriching patent trolls—companies that buy patents in order to extort money from innovators. These trolls are like a modern day mafia. […]
The larger players can afford to buy patents to deter the trolls, but the smaller players—the innovative startups—can’t. Instead, they have to settle out of court. Patent trolls take advantage of this weakness. […]
In the smartphone market alone, $15-20 billion has already been spent by technology companies on building defenses, says Stanford Law School professor Mark Lemley. For example, Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion—mostly for its patents. An Apple-Microsoft-Oracle-Nokia consortium bought Nortel’s patent portfolio for $4.5 billion. Microsoft bought Novell’s patent portfolio for $450 million and some of AOL’s patents for $1 billion. Facebook bought some of Microsoft’s new AOL patents for $550 million. Lemley estimates that more than $500 million has been squandered on legal fees—and battles are just beginning. This is money that could have been spent, instead, on R&D. […]
Clearly, the laws need revision. Feld says that software patents should be completely abolished—that in the modern era of computing, the best defense is speed to market, execution, and continuous innovation.
photo { Harry Callahan }
Despite 28 years of research, there is still no vaccine that provides effective protection against HIV, and in that time around 25 million people have died of HIV-related causes. To understand why creating a vaccine is so hard, you need to understand HIV. This is no ordinary virus. […] The virus is the most diverse we know of. It mutates so rapidly that people might carry millions of different versions of it, just months after becoming infected. HIV’s constantly changing form makes it unlike any viral foe we have tried to thwart with a vaccine. […]
Vaccines train the immune system to recognise part of a virus, creating a long-term armada of antibodies that seek and destroy the invader, should it ever show its face. For HIV, the most obvious target is gp120, the surface protein that it uses to attach itself to human cells. But gp120 also constantly changes shape, making it difficult to recognise. It also comes in clusters of three that are shielded by bulky sugar molecules, hiding it from the immune system.
On top of that, HIV targets immune cells, the very agents that are meant to kill it. And it can hide for years by shoving its DNA into that of its host, creating a long-term reservoir of potential infection.
So, creating an HIV vaccine is like trying to fire a gun at millions of shielded, moving targets. Oh, and they can eat your bullets.
photo { Nan Goldin }
Forget Hannibal Lecter. The movie portrayal of serial killers as deranged loners with unusually high IQs is dangerously wrong and can hinder investigations. According to the FBI, serial killers are much different in real life. For years, law enforcement investigators, academics, mental health experts, and the media have studied serial murder, from Jack the Ripper in the late 1800s to the sniper killings in 2002, and from the “Zodiac Killer” in California to the “BTK Killer” in Kansas. These diverse groups have long attempted to understand the complex issues related to serial killers. In 2005, the FBI hosted a symposium in San Antonio, Texas. This report contains the collective insights of a team of experts on serial murder. The symposium’s focus was actually two-fold: to bridge the gap between fact and fiction and to build up our body of knowledge to generate a more effective investigative response.
Much of the general public’s knowledge concerning serial murder is a product of Hollywood productions. […] Law enforcement professionals are subject to the same misinformation from a different source: the use of circumstantial information. Professionals, such as investigators, prosecutors, and pathologists may have limited exposure to serial murder. Their experience may be based upon a single murder series, and the factors in that case are generalized to other serial killers. As a result, stereotypes take root in the police community regarding the nature and characteristics of serial murders. […]
The majority of serial killers are not reclusive, social misfits who live alone. They are not monsters and may not appear strange. Many serial killers hide in plain sight within their communities. Serial murderers often have families and homes, are gainfully employed, and appear to be normal members of the community. […]
Contrary to popular belief, serial killers span all racial groups. The racial diversification of serial killers generally mirrors that of the overall U.S. population. […] Female serial killers do exist. […]
Serial murders are not sexually-based. There are many other motivations for serial murders including anger, thrill, financial gain, and attention seeking.
photo { Keizo Kitajima }
The explosive lawsuit alleges on January 16, 2012, Travolta picked up the masseur in a black Lexus SUV, which had “Trojan condoms in the console of the vehicle” and the duo went to a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. […] The masseuse tried to complete the deep tissue massage, but the lawsuit alleges, “Travolta, had removed his draping and was masturbating. Travolta’s penis was fully erect, and was roughly 8 inches in length, and his pubic hair was wirey and unkempt. […] The documents state that Travolta said there was a Hollywood actress staying at the hotel that “wanted three way sex, and wanted to be double penetrated.” Travolta said they could have that later, but first they needed to have sex together before calling her, so this way they would be in-sync with each other sexually.
Team-building exercises, simulation games, educational games, puzzle-solving activities, office parties, themed dress-down days, and colorful, aesthetically-stimulating workplaces are notable examples of this trend. […]
This is a relatively new conception of the relation between work and play. Until very recently, play was seen as the antithesis of work (see Kavanagh, this issue). Classical industrial theory, for example, hinges on a fundamental distinction between waged labour and recreation. Play at work is thought to pose a threat not only to labour discipline, but also to the very basis of the wage bargain: In exchange for a day’s pay, workers are expected to leave their pleasures at home. […]
When employees are urged to reach out to their ‘inner child,’ it becomes clear that the distinction between work and play is increasingly difficult to maintain in practice.
With such blurring of work and play, the traditional boundary between economic and artistic production also disappears. In much of the business literature on play, the entrepreneur and the artist melt into one figure. […]
Yet while contemporary organizations have colonized play for profit-seeking purposes, this inevitably has unforeseen consequences. Play may turn back against the organization and disrupt its smooth functioning; the managers who open a game in the organization may find that they lose control over it and come to realize that play is occasionally able to usurp work rather than stimulate it. Play serves organizational objectives only insofar as it is kept within certain ludic limits. […]
This special issue emerged from an ephemera conference on ‘Work, Play and Boredom’ held at the University of St Andrews in May 2010. At the heart of the conference was the idea that ‘boredom’ might be an appropriate concept for rethinking the interconnections between work and play in present-day organizations.
{ ephemera | PDF }
photo { Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1962 }
If we look at how communication works we find that words and phrases have a great influence on attention. They bring into the consciousness of the listener the concepts that are uttered. This is what meaning is – the concepts that a word or phrase can steer attention towards. This is what communication is – the sharing of attention by two (or more) brains on a sequence of concepts.
So it is not surprising that it is useful to talk to oneself. What we are doing when we self-talk is to steer our consciousness. In recent paper, Lupyan and Swingley look at how self-directed speech affects searching.
The ‘body clock’ or circadian rhythms controls things like alertness, sleep patterns, appetite and hormones, and travelling across time zones or working nights can disturb it. […]
The researchers found that two nuclear receptors (receptors that sense hormones), called REV-ERB-α and REV-ERB-β, control the circadian expression of core circadian clock and lipid homeostatic gene networks. Not getting enough sleep puts you at increased risk of obesity, diabetes and related metabolic disorders.
Adscend Media agreed not to spam Facebook users and pay US$100,000 in court and attorney fees, according to the settlement. […] Adscend Media’s spamming generated up to $20 million a year.
On December 25, 2011, however, headlines were ablaze with the news: China and Japan had reached an agreement to use their own currencies in trade and financial transactions. Their governments would establish a market for direct exchange of yuan and yen, avoiding the convoluted process in which a bank or firm in one country must first sell its national currency for dollars and then use them to buy the currency of the other. As part of the same agreement, Japan’s central bank agreed to hold more of its foreign currency reserves, most of which are in dollars, in yuan instead. (…)
A first thing to say is that the dollar, like the United States, isn’t going anywhere. The United States still accounts for nearly a quarter of global GDP when the output of other countries is valued at market exchange rates (which is the appropriate metric when one is concerned with international transactions). By this measure, the United States is still nearly three times the economic size of both China and Japan. Its financial markets are deep and liquid. The market in U.S. Treasury bonds—the principal instrument that foreign central banks hold as reserves—is the single largest financial market in the world. The fact that there exists a huge volume of currency transactions involving dollars allows investors to buy them in substantial quantities without driving up their price and to sell them without driving that price down. In the competition with other currencies, in other words, the dollar enjoys the advantages of incumbency.
photo { Brian Finke }
{ Why identical twins differ—despite having the same DNA }
images { Walt Disney with elephant at the American Museum of Natural History }
Fortune Teller Used Google to Speak to the Dead.
Solution found for dead cows stuck in mountain cabin.
Zoo Keeper Helps Constipated Monkey Pass Peanut By Licking Its Butt For An Hour.
California seller of suicide kits sentenced for tax offense.
Peru coast littered with hundreds of dead birds and dead dolphins.
LAPD plans separate jail for transgender suspects.
Lehman E-Mails Show Wall Street Arrogance Led to the Fall.
Korea plans hashtag-inspired skyscraper.
Happiness model developed by MU researcher could help people go from good to great.
Scientists have long wondered why left-handed people are a rarity. A new study suggests lefties are rare because of the balance between cooperation and competition in human evolution.
Study finds emotion reversed in left-handers’ brains.
Jealousy and envy at work are different in men and women.
Research suggests infants begin to learn about race in the first year.
Researchers Aim to Read Your Dog’s Thoughts.
Mobile Spam Texts Hit 4.5 Billion Raising Consumer Ire.
Why Verizon Doesn’t Want You to Buy an iPhone.
An online search portal has been launched that reveals the IP addresses of any Skype user.
Electric airplanes are about to take off.
Researchers create life-sized 3D hologram for videoconferencing.
Double Fine raised $3,335,265 in a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. How long before the Kickstarter bubble bursts?
Over at Forbes, Eric Jackson argues quite convincingly that Google and Facebook – powerful though they are now – probably won’t be top dogs on the web for long. How do we deal with the ‘Facebook apocalypse’?
The Scientific Flaws of Online Dating Sites. What the “matching algorithms” miss.
Take top thinkers from Silicon Valley and science, mix them with scientists, innovators and philanthro-capitalists, and you’ve got the Singularity University.
From the diver who finds the body parts, to the forensic specialist who identifies flecks of paint on the victim and the handwriting expert who examines the killer’s notes. What happens at a crime scene?
Valuing art through its theft.
Leonardo da Vinci: How accurate were his anatomy drawings?
Antarctic krill form one of the largest biomasses of any individual animal species. The total biomass of bacteria may equal that of plants.
Materials scientists are researching the link between metals and taste. How cutlery affects your food.
6 media giants control 90% of what we read, watch, or listen to.
List of silent musical compositions.
‘Unabomber’ Global Warming Billboard.
Your source for news about whether or not Oakland is, in fact, burning.
Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts.
“The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. […]
Blood was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the vitality of the body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire. The 16th century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking, and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. […]
As science strode forward, however, cannibal remedies died out. The practice dwindled in the 18th century, around the time Europeans began regularly using forks for eating and soap for bathing. But Sugg found some late examples of corpse medicine: In 1847, an Englishman was advised to mix the skull of a young woman with treacle (molasses) and feed it to his daughter to cure her epilepsy. (He obtained the compound and administered it, as Sugg writes, but “allegedly without effect.”)
photo { Volgareva Irina }
