The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Chemicals affecting entire food chains–bee apocalypse coming soon
Geography of Hate: Interactive map of twitter texts with racist term
Journalism Done Right — Is Terminal Cancer a Pre-Requisite for Empathy and Integrity in Reporting?
Special Report: U.S. cyberwar strategy stokes fear of blowback
Think Again: Big Data: Why the rise of machines isn't all it's cracked up to be.
This is not good news. And guess which country is number one in this category? Do you think this might be the result of the toxins and hormones in our environment, food, and water? This is exactly what one would expect to see in large animal studies designed to study the process of disease.
Brain Diseases Affecting More People and Starting Earlier Than Ever Before
Science Daily
Additional unintended consequences of GMOS resulting from a view of the earth that values only profits, with no consideration as to wellness at any level. Click through to see the relevant charts. A fully referenced and illustrated version of this article is posted on ISIS members website and is otherwise available for download: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/login.
GM Crops and Water – A Recipe for Disaster
Institute of Science in Society
Subject: Fukushima update
Dear Friends,
Bad news continues to pour out of Fukushima-Daiichi. The first article below discusses the impact of F-D radiation on Canadian flora and fauna. The second details the involvement of the Japanese Mafia, the Yakuza, in the containment/cleanup process. The third describes TEPCO's mounting financial losses, as they struggle to keep on top of the problems of contaminated groundwater, electrical outages, etc., move ahead with taking the rods out of the dangerous spent fuel pools, and deal with the many lawsuits arising from the disaster. TEPCO has admitted culpability, so has to pay the victims.
Clearly, the situation is out of control. The US needs to lead the way in rallying international support for the crippled plant,- it's more than Japan can handle. A Senate investigation would be a first step in making that happen. Please continue to circulate this petition. Anyone can sign it!
Peace, Carol Wolman, MD
May 8, 2013
Next week I am doing an invited talk in London. My subject is search and Big Data. I will be digging into this notion in this month’s Honk newsletter and adding some business intelligence related comments at an Information Today conference in New York later this month. (I have chopped the number of talks I am giving this year because at my age air travel and the number of 20 somethings at certain programs makes me jumpy.)
I want to highlight one point in my upcoming London talk; namely, the financial challenge which companies face when they embrace Big Data and then want to search the information in the system and search the Big Data system’s outputs.
Notice that precision and recall has not improved significantly over the last 30 years. I anticipate that many search vendors will tell me that their systems deliver excellent precision and recall. I am not convinced. The data which I have reviewed show that over a period of 10 years most systems hit the 80 to 85 percent precision and recall level for content which is about a topic. Content collections composed of scientific, technical, and medical information where the terminology is reasonably constrained can do better. I have seen scores above 90 percent. However, for general collections, precision and recall has not been improving relative to the advances in other disciplines; for example, converting structured data outputs to fancy graphics.
I don’t want to squabble about precision and recall. The main point is that when an organization mashes Big Data with search, two curves must be considered. The first is the complexity curve. The idea is that search is a reasonably difficult system to implement in an effective manner. The addition of a Big Data system adds another complex task. When two complex tasks are undertaken at the same time, the costs go up.
Little by little we are slowly learning that the network of life is far subtler and more complex than we have ever understood. Personally I think this idea of nanoscale sound waves is unlikely to be true. Conceptually it is preposterous. At nano scale a grain of sand would be like a mountain. It is very hard to see how the level of possible sound propagation a plant could achieve could get through the ground. I think some kind of nonlocal link! age is more likely but we will see.
Shhh, the Plants Are Talking
ANDREW PORTERFIELD – Science
The word in the garden is that basil is good to have around. Plants are known to communicate with each other via shade, aromatic chemicals, and physical touch, promoting processes such as growth and defense against disease, as well as attraction of bees and other pollinators.
Now, online today inBMC Ecology, researchers report a new type of mechanism that some plants use to communicate. The team planted common chili pepper seeds (Capsicum annuum, pictured) near a basil plant, with barriers that prevented the basil from deploying its usual growth-promoting tricks. Despite the separation, chili seeds germinated faster when basil was a neighbor, suggesting that a message was getting through.
Because light, touch, and chemical “smell” were ruled out, the team proposes that the finding points to a new type of communication between plants, possibly involving nanoscale sound waves, traveling through the dirt to bring encouraging “words” to the growing seeds. Understanding this novel communication could help growers boost crop yields and increase global food supplies. How neighborly.
Continue reading “SchwartzReport: The Plants are Talking — Intra-Terrestial Intelligence”
Missing from all this is the OSC/M4IS2 solution.
Our global networks have generated many benefits and new opportunities. However, they have also established highways for failure propagation, which can ultimately result in man-made disasters. For example, today’s quick spreading of emerging epidemics is largely a result of global air traffic, with serious impacts on global health, social welfare, and economic systems.
In a Nature paper on globally networked risks, ETH Zürich Prof. Dr. Dirk Helbing, Chair of Sociology, illustrates how cascade effects and complex dynamics amplify the vulnerability of networked systems. For example, just a few long-distance connections can largely decrease our ability to mitigate the threats posed by global pandemics.
Initially beneficial trends, such as globalization, increasing network densities, higher complexity, and an acceleration of institutional decision processes may ultimately push man-made or human-influenced systems towards systemic instability, Helbing finds. Systemic instability refers to a system that will get out of control sooner or later, even if everybody involved is well skilled, highly motivated and behaving properly. Crowd disasters are shocking examples illustrating that many deaths may occur even when everybody tries hard not to hurt anyone.
Our intuition of systemic risks is misleading
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Kurzweil on Global Networks Must be Redesigned”
Human Security — A New Response to Complex Threats
Written by Sadako Ogata
Today, millions of people face extreme insecurity as a result of conflicts and economic crises — not only in acute conflicts like Syria but also in many lower-profile crises. To be sure, great strides have been made since the start of this century, notably in reducing global poverty, due in large part to the concerted action and targeted goals to be achieved by 2015 that were set in motion at the landmark 2000 UN Millennium Summit. However, there is no denying that, in too many parts of our world, the international community fails to protect people whose lives are dangerously at risk.
This calls upon us to mount a new response to meeting human needs, one that recognizes the complex nature of the problems now before us. Such a response exists in the concept of human security, which was advanced a decade ago with the release of the findings of the UN Commission on Human Security, which I co-chaired with Amartya Sen.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Human Security as Paradigm for Hybrid Governance”
