Archive for March, 2011
China Tightens Electronic Censorship: ‘Protest’ Ends Phone Calls
Photo: Yoshi Canopus (CC)
The New York Times reports on some disturbing developments on China:
BEIJING — If anyone wonders whether the Chinese government has tightened its grip on electronic communications since protests began engulfing the Arab world, Shakespeare may prove instructive.
A Beijing entrepreneur, discussing restaurant choices with his fiancée over their cellphones last week, quoted Queen Gertrude’s response to Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The second time he said the word “protest,” her phone cut off.
He spoke English, but another caller, repeating the same phrase on Monday in Chinese over a different phone, was also cut off in midsentence.
A host of evidence over the past several weeks shows that Chinese authorities are more determined than ever to police cellphone calls, electronic messages, e-mail and access to the Internet in order to smother any hint of antigovernment sentiment. In the cat-and-mouse game that characterizes electronic communications here, analysts suggest that the…
Sexual Preference Chemical Found In Mice
BBC News reports:
A chemical in the brain controls sexual preference in mice, according to scientists in China.
Male mice bred without serotonin lose their preference for females, a report in Nature says.
The researchers say it is the first time that a neurotransmitter has been shown to play a role in sexual preference in mammals.
Experts have warned about the dangers of drawing conclusions about human sexuality.
The research team first bred male mice whose brains were not receptive to serotonin.
A series of experiments demonstrated that these mice had lost the preference for females shown by unmodified males.
When presented with a choice of partners, they showed no overall preference for either males or females…
Could Obama Be Impeached Over Libya? Let’s Ask Biden
Joe Biden comments on unconstitutional launching of military action. Comments from 2007.
Socialbots To The Rescue
Many of us have encountered various “bots” in chat and other environments online for years. However, their behavior is apparently improving to the point where we are able to be more easily gamed by them. New Scientist reports on Socialbot use on Twitter (via SBS World News Australia):
Over a two-week period, the three “socialbots” were able to integrate themselves into the group, and gained close to 250 followers between them. They received more than 240 responses to the tweets they sent.
This effort was in fact part of Socialbots 2011, a competition designed to test whether bots can be used to alter the structure of a social network.
Each team had a Twitter account controlled by a socialbot. Like regular human users, the bot could follow other Twitter users and send messages. Bots were rewarded for the number of followers they amassed and the number of responses their tweets generated.
…The military may…
Sales of Doomsday Bunkers Up 1,000%
Blake Ellis reports for CNN:
A devastating earthquake strikes Japan. A massive tsunami kills thousands. Fears of a nuclear meltdown run rampant. Bloodshed and violence escalate in Libya.
And U.S. companies selling doomsday bunkers are seeing sales skyrocket anywhere from 20% to 1,000%…
Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs
Adapted from Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs: How Surgery Can Be Hazardous to Your Health – And What to Do About It by Harvey Bigelsen, MD. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.
“Well Mrs. So-and-So,” says Dr. Almighty, “since you are fifty years old and reaching menopause, you don’t need your uterus anymore; in fact it is probably getting in the way. Since we will be in there, we may as well take out your appendix because you don’t need it either, and taking it out will prevent future appendicitis. Most older women have gall bladder problems, so let’s take that out too, for prevention. Oh, and one of my friends is a plastic surgeon: While you are asleep and can’t feel anything, he can do a tummy tuck and smooth out some of your wrinkles with Botox. Don’t worry, it’s very, very poisonous, but we will just use it on your wrinkles. No big deal!”1
Sounds fabulous, doesn’t it? One-stop surgery: magically taking care of everything that could possibly affect you over the next ten years…
The Weird And Wonderful Sketchbooks Of Alexander Graham Bell
The Atlantic has scans from the notebooks of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who had an abundance of ideas for serious and non-serious devices. It’s a delight to peruse his sketches, of both nature and such inventions as helicopters, futuristic eyeglasses, playground equipment, the “radiotome”, and (at right) the horse-pulled kite:
It was on March 10, 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful telephone call. “‘Mr. Watson–come here–I want to see you,” he said to his assistant, who was in the next room. Bell recorded those early telephone experiments in his lab notebooks from the time, as he did with countless other experiments and ideas.
The books are a priceless treasure of an incredibly fertile mind working through one of the most exciting periods of technological innovation in the history of the world. The sketches, though, are more than just dry recordings of physical principles. Bell’s drawings are expressive in ways…
Unpaid Huffington Post Writers May Strike Following $315 Million Sale To AOL
The progressive views of leading liberal website the Huffington Post apparently stop at the office door. When your company is worth $315 million, it’s hard to make excuses for not paying your writers, and so the Newspaper Guild is urging the site’s unpaid bloggers to strike, in a controversy that has gone oddly undermentioned in the left-wing blogosphere. The Wrap reports:
Arianna Huffington scoffed at a group of unpaid Huffington Post contributors that announced on Wednesday they would stop contributing content to the site, weeks after its $315 million sale to AOL was announced.
“The idea of going on strike when no one really notices,” Huffington said. “Go ahead, go on strike.”
The controversy arose after writers for the websites ArtScene and Visual Art Source , which had been contributing content to the Huffington Post for free since 2010, refuse to contribute additional material to the site unless they got paid. They are asking…
Maine Town Declares Food Sovereignty
Sedgwick, Maine
Do we really need the government to regulate our food? Sedgwick, Maine doesn’t think so and has become the first town to take action towards producing and selling their own foods. Sustainable Cities Collective reports:
The town of Sedgwick, Maine, population 1,012 (according to the 2000 census), has become the first town in the United States to pass a Food Sovereignty ordinance. In doing so, the town declared their right to produce and sell local foods of their choosing, without the oversight of State or federal regulation.
What does this mean? In the debate over raw milk, for example, the law opens the gate for consumer and producer to enter a purchasing agreement without interference from state or federal health regulators. According to the Mayo Clinic, a 1987 FDA regulation required that all milk be pasteurized to kill pathogens such as salmonella and E. coli. The Sedgwick ordinance declares that:
Producers or processors of local foods in the Town…
Glenn Beck Considers Starting His Own Network
Glenn Beck at the Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C.
Oprah Winfrey got her own network, now Glenn Beck is considering it. Will a network last if it only has it’s delusional audience to rely on? The New York Times reports:
The possibility that Glenn Beck will exit the Fox News Channel at the end of the year has prompted a big question in media circles: if he leaves, how will he bring his considerable audience with him?
Two of the options Mr. Beck has contemplated, according to people who have spoken about it with him, are a partial or wholesale takeover of a cable channel, or an expansion of his subscription video service on the Web.
Reports this week that Joel Cheatwood, a senior Fox News executive, would soon join Mr. Beck’s growing media company, Mercury Radio Arts, were the latest indication that Mr. Beck intended to leave Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, when…
ATF Purposely Allowed Drug Cartels To Buy And Smuggle Thousands Of Assault Weapons
In a secret program called “Fast and Furious”, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms knowingly let thousands of assault rifles (such as AK-47s) “walk” across the border into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico — ATF planned to track the guns for intelligence purposes and “see where they ended up.” The weaponry in question has been used in a spree of deadly crimes, including the murders of U.S. government agents Jaime Zapata and Brian Terry. A whistleblower at ATF brought the matter to light, CBS News reports:
Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is asking the U.S. government for details about ATF’s “Fast and Furious” operations.
As our CBS News Investigation has revealed, “Fast and Furious” was a secret program under which, sources say, ATF purposely allowed thousands of assault rifles and other weapons from the U.S. into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico. Insiders call it letting the guns “walk.”
Documents…
British Supermarket Chain Starts Dating Service Based On Shopping Habits
Asda, a British retail giant owned by Wal-Mart, has launched an online dating site which matches singles by the products they purchase. Because, really, you are what you buy, and who would want to cohabit with someone who consumes a different brand of toilet paper? Business Review Europe gets starry-eyed:
Asda customers may be able to find love among the cabbages. According to Asda, the novel idea came about after a survey conducted on 10,000 of their shoppers showed that 71 percent of men and 64 percent of women look for a possible match in their local supermarket. And 41 percent said they viewed contents of fellow shoppers baskets to try and gauge whether they were single. Asda has decided to give the lonely hearts of our nation a helping hand!
Asdadating.com is the ‘perfect matchmaking option,’ explains a Asda spokesperson, ‘you can chat to fellow shoppers you like the look of whilst getting…
Having A Harder Time Finding What You’re Looking For On The Web?
The Internet is getting staggeringly “large.” (How large? See this infographic.)
Though there are plenty of very smart people working very hard to make it easy for you to keep finding the things you’re looking for, as well as finding solutions to that conundrum librarians are especially acquainted with – finding the thing you didn’t know you were looking for – it is still getting increasingly difficult to find signal in the noise.
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that it is increasingly difficult to find what you’re looking for online. Of course there are (or were? wow) services like delicious. But the issue I’m talking about is signal to noise. There’s a ton of information on the net. As Carl Sagan would say in his Kermit-the-frog voice, “billions and billions of interwubs. How can we parse it, and find what we need? What about when we don’t even know what we need?
This problem is of course how…
Did Capitalism End Life On Mars?
Hugo Chavez really, really hates capitalism. The Venezuelan leader cites the barren planet Mars as an example of what happens when capitalism takes over the world (report from Reuters via Yahoo Finance):
Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday.
“I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet,” Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day.
Chavez, who also holds capitalism responsible for many of the world’s problems, warned that water supplies on Earth were drying up.
“Careful! Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts,” Chavez said, sipping from a glass of water.
He added that the West’s attacks…
Digital Media’s Problem: Monetizing The Container
When you “steal” an album, there is one sense in which you are not “stealing” anything. It costs a band or label nothing for you to download their album, in terms of distribution. In fact, you’ve just saved them a lot of trouble. You got that music all up in your earholes without troubling them with distribution one bit.
But, the problem, of course, is that this stuff isn’t “free” to produce. In fact, the number of hidden costs involved with producing media are pretty amazing, especially when you consider time and effort as the primary resources that humans represent, when viewed within the capitalist myth. As a producer of independent media in quite a few formats – not to mention working inside companies that have been burdened and seriously threatened by this change of paradigm – I think I can say I’m pretty well acquainted with the terror that drives…
Snoop Dogg, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga Go Where The Money Is: Silicon Valley
Facebook = Katy Perry; Twitter = Snoop Dogg; Google = Lady Gaga. Who’s got the biggest star? Not much competition as Alexia Tsotsis points out at TechCrunch:
As the battle for Silicon Valley engineering talent intensifies, it seems as if hot tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter have launched some sort of ridiculous competition as to who could can score the biggest Hollywood talent for an onsite appearance, in order to wow current and future employees.
Between Ashton Kutcher and Chamillionaire at Y Combinator Demo days…
Let’s Compare the (New) U.S. Bombing of Libya to the U.S Bombing of the Former ‘Yugoslavia’
The Hidden Reality Of Japanese Nuclear Plant Workers
The 1995 investigative documentary Nuclear Ginza exposes radiation poisoning among workers inside Japan’s nuclear power industry:
The Importance Of Being Alone
In a hyper-connected world, does spending time alone provide a unique and increasingly elusive form of freedom? The Boston Globe extols the virtues of solitude, which a growing body of study suggests is essential for mood, memory, creativity, and sanity:
You hear it all the time: We humans are social animals. We need to spend time together to be happy and functional, and we extract a vast array of benefits from maintaining intimate relationships and associating with groups.
But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking.
There is even research to suggest that blocking off…
