In the emergent “panspectric” order, human society is seen in terms of “information traffic.” (…)

The purpose of the article is to reassure readers: cold and inhuman “traffic flows” that circulate through various channels, “regardless of who or what”, is quite different from “an individual”, “a specific actual person” – the human subject. However, Tolgfors’ reasoning avoids a crucial point: more and more actors – the security services and large companies, but also academics and activists – have started to see human society as nothing more than “flows” of influences. The more information channel flows are logged in detail, the better insight we gain into people’s psyches. (…)

According to Deleuze, in emergent societies of control, we are dispersed individuals: “We no longer find ourselves dealing with the ‘mass-individual’ dyad. Individuals have become dividuals and masses, samples, data, markets, or banks.” The computer is more interested in finding patterns in the huge amount of data currently generated by the human multitude: increasingly extensive areas of our everyday analogue experience are being transferred and stored as digital data.

{ Karl Palmas/Eurozine | Continue reading }

Where will the next food crisis strike and how to face it? (…)

Satellite observation is the key instrument that will allow to double in 2010 the number of countries monitored in real time for detecting first indications of adverse agricultural outcomes. (…)

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 1 billion people go to bed each night with an empty stomach.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

related { Premier Foods declares war on own-label goods. }

{ Obsessive driving fanatics are prone to drive aggressively | Full story }

screenshot { from Embryo, 1976 | more | IMDb }

Evolution, the theory goes, guarantees survival to the fittest. But we can blame evolution for some of today’s most pressing health problems, such as cancer, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

A 2009 Gallup poll found that 44% of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form within the past 10,000 years. Many of them also think the human body is perfectly designed.

But most scientists—including biologists, anthropologists, paleontologists and geneticists—see the 21st century human body as a collection of compromises, jury-rigged by evolution as our ancestors adapted to changing conditions.

“In many ways, we are maladapted for modernity,” says Stephen Stearns, a Yale evolutionary biologist.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

porcelain sculpture { Kate Macdowell | more }

Over the last 30 years, the US financial system has grown to proportions threatening the global economic order. This column suggests a ‘doomsday cycle’ has infiltrated the economic system and could lead to disaster after the next financial crisis. It says the best route to creating a safer system is to have very large and robust capital requirements, which are legislated and difficult to circumvent or revise. (…)

The doomsday cycle has several simple stages. At the start, creditors and depositors provide banks with cheap funding in the expectation that if things go very wrong, our central banks and fiscal authorities will bail them out. Banks such as Lehman Brothers – and many others in this past cycle – use the funds to take large risks, with the aim of providing dividends and bonuses to shareholders and management.

Through direct subsidies (such as deposit insurance) and indirect support (such as central bank bailouts), we encourage our banking system to ignore large, socially harmful ‘tail risks’ – those risks where there is a small chance of calamitous collapse. As far as banks are concerned, they can walk away and let the state clean it up. Some bankers and policymakers even do well during the collapse that they helped to create.

{ Peter Boone and Simon Johnson/VOX | Continue reading }

Graduates prefer cats. According to press reports of research at the University of Bristol, households with graduates are 36 per cent more likely to have cats than their academically uninstructed counterparts. Most reports attribute the difference to discrepant brain power. “Clever people are more likely to own cats than dogs,” says the Press Association version of the findings.

The newspapers have diffused the same message. Jane Murray, who led the research, is credited with a rival explanation: “It could be related to longer working hours,” which leave graduates with less time to care for pets than the implicitly idle dog-lovers. (…)

I like cats. (…) The real difference between cat-lovers and dog-lovers has nothing to do with income, education or habits of work. It is, I suspect, a matter of morals. Dog-lovers are good. Cat-lovers are morally indifferent or actively evil.

{ Times Higher Education | Continue reading }

{ Nuala Sawyer, The Sleepers | more }

{ Nuala Sawyer, Suprasternal Notches | Enlarge }

Doctors warned of a potentially dangerous method of cocaine abuse–injecting the drug directly into the urinary tract–a practice that led to complications costing one man his penis, nine of his fingers and parts of his legs. (…)

Perry said the man was admitted to a New York hospital for a problem with his penis, which had remained erect for three days resulting in a painful inability to urinate. (…)

On his third day in the hospital, the man’s erection suddenly went down, but blood leaked into the tissues and coagulated under the skin of his feet, hands, genitals, back and chest over the next 12 hours.

{ UPI/Cocaine.org | Continue reading | Thanks Reto! }

An old Greek fable famously tells the story of a fox, who tries really hard to get his hands on a tasty vine of grapes. The fox tries and he tries, but eventually fails in all of his attempts to acquire the grapes; at which point the fox calmly continues with his life by convincing himself that he really didn’t want those grapes that badly after all…

Although there is a common wisdom in this tale of how we deal with being thwarted in our desires, a more modern psychological account of the fox’s tale may look a little different: i.e. if the fox in our tale had been reading today’s psychological journals he may have concluded, more precisely, that had he continued in his efforts, and finally obtained the grapes, THEN he may not have liked them as much.

To see why the fox may have concluded this, we must first consider that from a physiological (and pharmacological) perspective, wanting something and liking something do not necessarily go hand-in-hand, and that they certainly aren’t the same thing. For example, a drug addict really, really wants her fix, but many addicts genuinely report not particularly liking their subsequent drugged out experiences. Additionally, a number of psychological studies show that liking and wanting can be independently manipulated, and that often times both operate at a subconscious level.

{ Daniel R Hawes | Continue reading }

As an illustration of the approach to media we are proposing, consider the case of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election in 2003 to the governorship of California. Schwarzenegger’s victory has often been attributed to his status as a Hollywood star, as if that somehow guaranteed success.

But this explanation, in our view, falls far short. If it were adequate, we would have to explain the fact that the vast majority of governors and other political officeholders in this country are not actors or other media celebrities, but practitioners of that arcane and tedious profession known as the law. If Hollywood stardom were a sufficient condition to attain political office, Congress would be populated by Susan Sarandons and Sylvester Stallones, not Michele Bachmanns and Ed Markeys.

Something other than media stardom was clearly required. And that something was the nature of the legal and political systems that give California such a volatile and populist political culture, namely the rules that allow for popular referendums and, more specifically, make it relatively easy to recall an unpopular governor. California has, in other words, a distinctive set of political mediations in place that promote immediacy in the form of direct democracy and rapid interventions by the electorate. It is difficult to imagine the Schwarzenegger episode occurring in any other state.

{ Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen | The University of Chicago Press | Continue reading }

Many entrepreneurial and driven bros aspire to be members of the billionaires club. However, we all know that “pimpin’ ain’t easy.” Billionaire bachelors and captains of industry can’t just date or marry an everyday simpleton when there’s the risk of losing ten figures of wealth and power to a money-hungry gold digger. There’s simply too much on the line when your annual income is higher than the gross domestic product of some third-world nations. Perhaps this is why there are so few billionaire bachelors in the world. According to the personal wealth arbiters at Forbes magazine, there were only 72 single and ready-to-mingle bachelors and bachelorette with billionaire status in 2009.

{ BroBible | Continue reading }

photo { Mirage magazine/Facebook page | Mirage magazine }

related { Dating study: women prefer ‘men who are kind’ }

It starts with a barely perceptible blurring of vision from time to time - the sort of thing you might chalk up to getting older. But when you get it checked out, there is disturbing news: you have a disease called age-related macular degeneration, or AMD. (…)

People typically develop AMD after the age of 50, and it affects nearly 1 in 10 of those over the age of 80. It is the most common cause of blindness in the west.

It can progress slowly or quickly, but there is no cure. (…)

Now, however, a possible treatment for dry AMD is on the horizon.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

related { Mechanized cooks invade the kitchen | NY Times | Full story }

Corvids – crows, ravens, jays, and magpies – are well known to be among the most intelligent of birds. Along with parrots, corvids have been a frequent subject of avian intelligence studies. Experiments have documented problem-solving and tool use, both in the lab and in the wild. Many of the recent experiments have tested intelligence in New Caledonian Crows (Corvus moneduloides), but tests of Ravens (Corvus corax) and Rooks (Corvus frugilegus) have also found problem-solving capabilities. New Caledonian Crows are a common subect for research because they are known to use a variety of tools in the wild.

{ A D. C. Birding Blog | Continue reading }

I used to think feminists had  a lot of things to worry about, such as the fact that even the most educated and capable of women still make 78 cents on a man’s dollar, that women are still subject to many more crimes of physical and domestic violence than men, and that hard-won reproductive rights are in danger of being systematically withdrawn without our consent. (…)

Who knew? Facial hair is, apparently, a feminist issue.

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

For whatever reason–plane crash, riptide, sailing misadventure, a bad case of Ocean Fury–you find yourself in the middle of the sea with nothing but miles of water around you. And, to your horror, here comes that heavy string music and a circling fin slicing through the water.

Luckily, from multiple websites and news stories about shark survival you remember the Shark’s Achilles Heel: Punches to the face. Specifically, the tender nose area. You wind up to belt that fishy bastard in the schnoz, and make your testicles proud.

The Result: First let’s look at a shark. Can you find his nose? Yep, it’s that incredibly narrow point in front that drops precipitously into a slimy, downward sloping ramp right into his 5,000,000-toothed mouth.

Take into account the fact that you’re bobbing around in the water like a buoy full of meat, facing off against a lightning-quick predator with several million years of practice in eating things that punch it in the nose, and you’ll see that chances are your fist will just deflect down into that aforementioned gaping hole of teeth like Boba Fett into a Sarlacc Pit. Now if your plan to defeat the shark is too feed yourself to him until he grows tired of the taste of you, you’re off to a great start.

But experts say that even if you hit the shark-nose punching lottery, you won’t have scared him off, just dazed him, giving you a minute or so tops. Now, if this particular shark is suffering from ADD, then great: You’re in the clear now. He’s off to chase a shiny thing or update his twitter feed 82 times an hour. But if not, all you’ve done is managed to piss the shark off and give him a minute to ponder how revenge is a dish best served in a blood-filled bag resembling you.

{ 7 common survival tactics (that will get you killed) | Cracked | Continue reading }

related { Can a book teach you how to survive? }

{ Sleep, say US feminists, is the next big issue for women to address — doing less and enjoying more duvet time is the way to go. | Times | Full story }

photo { Abbey Drucker }

Nazi theft of Greek gold during the Second World War is to blame for the country’s faltering finances, Athens claimed yesterday. It came as new protests about the economy turned violent.

Greece said the real culprit for its problems were the Nazis, whose occupation lasted from 1941 to 1945.

‘They took away the Greek gold that was at the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back,’ said Deputy prime minister Theodoros Pangalos. ‘I don’t say they have to give back the money necessarily but they have at least to say “thanks”.’

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

Where is all that Greek gold?

Last week I mentioned the (what seemed to me and much of the world) odd incident of Greek politicians talking about the need for Germany to pay its debts to Greece. I got this response from a Greek reader. Comments afterword.

“Dear Mr. Mauldin,

I am an avid reader and I just wanted to correct you about a comment in one of your articles, “The Pain in Spain”, specifically:

‘Somehow they forgot about the German government paying 115 million deutschmarks in 1960 — not a small sum back then.’

This repayment of 1960 is undeniable. but the total amount owed was $10 billion ($3.5 billion for the return of the gold stolen and the repayment of the war loans Greece was forced into giving Germany, and $7 billion in war reparations awarded to Greece in 1946). As the DM/$ parity was then four for one, this means they gave Greece $29 million out of the $10 billion owed.

Germany also proclaims that they have given Greece over the years, in one form or another, €16.5 billion. But the fact of the matter is that despite these alleged payments, the issue of the war loans and gold is still not settled.

Greece has never stopped asking for the money to be paid back … it is estimated that this sum owed now totals $70 billion [I assume the Greeks want interest – JM]. So even taking into account the €16.5 billion, more than $50 billion is still owed.

Helmut Kohl refused to even discuss the repayment, presenting as an excuse that this amount was owed by the whole of Germany and until Germany is unified the issue could not be discussed.

Guess what, Germany is unified….

Best Regards,
Anthony Kioussopoulos

P.S. Do not take my e-mail as a refusal to acknowledge the fault of successive Greek governments in creating this mess; just take it as a correction for a specific issue.”

+++++

The point here is not that Anthony is 100% right, though his statements have the ring of authenticity. The point is that the Greeks believe it. And thus my lack of surprise last week when I noted that leading Greek politicians of both the conservative and liberal parties were talking the same line. This is an issue that runs across the Greek political spectrum. And that makes the situation all the more intractable, as emotional responses are not the stuff of rational debates.

{ John Mauldin | Continue reading | PDF }

Conformity is such a strong influence in society that it’s impossible to understand human behaviour without it. Psychological experiments show that people will deny the evidence of their own eyes in order to conform with other people.

Understanding when we conform has all kinds of practical real-world benefits, depending on your aims: it can help you understand your own behaviour as well as understand how others will behave under a variety of different situational pressures. Everyone should be aware of these factors and how they affect the most important areas of their social life.

Here are the ten timeless influencers of conformity:

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

cartoon { Doug Savage }

Lyotard focused on the idea of narratives. Past periods, Modernism in particular, had been fond of what he called “meta-narratives,” all-inclusive narrative frameworks that explained everything, more or less.

{ The Smart Set | Continue reading }