SchwartzReport: How Big Finance Has Killed US Economy Including Innovation
03 Economy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, IneptitudeThis is a really good take on what is happening financially, and why it has a deadening effect on technological development. When immediate profit is your only priority, there are no correcting forces, and you slowly go off course in terms of wellness. Until you crash. We ask the wrong questions so we get the wrong answers. Author’s note: This post is based on papers presented and remarks made during a *conference panel I moderated featuring William Lazonick of U Mass-Lowell, Jan Kregel of the Levy Institute and Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO.
Big Finance Is Strangling Innovation
LYNN STUART PARRAMORE, Senior Editor – Salon/AlterNet (U.S.)
Mini-Me: NSA-Google-MIT Can Now Plant False Memories
Academia, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Huh?
MIT scientists implant a false memory into a mouse’s brain
Sometime soon, a lab mouse could wake up thinking he had snuggled up to a girl mouse the night before. But he hadn’t. The memory would be fake.
Scientists have successfully implanted a false memory into a mouse’s brain — a seemingly far-fetched idea reminiscent of a science fiction film.
“If mice had Hollywood, this would be ‘Inception’ for them,” said one of the lead researchers, MIT neuroscientist Steve Ramirez, whose study was published online Thursday in the journal Science.
Ramirez and his colleagues tagged brain cells associated with a specific memory and then tweaked that memory to make the mouse believe something had happened when it hadn’t.
Marcus Aurelius: Democratic Defense Play-Book — Truman Security Briefing Book Edition 5 — Idiocy Lite
Cultural Intelligence, Idiocy, Military
From Politico Morning Defense:
FIRST LOOK – THE STRONG-ON-DEFENSE PLAYBOOK: A leading national-security think tank is releasing the latest edition of its annual briefing book, which has become a kind of playbook for strong-on-defense Democrats. The Truman National Security Project, which spent more than $90,000 during the 2012 presidential campaign to help defeat Republican Mitt Romney, has been working to build a coalition of center-left members of Congress with strong records on defense – and its briefing book offers messaging strategies for countering Republican defense hawks.
The book, an advance copy of which was provided to Morning D, urges an increased emphasis on diplomacy and alliance-building and says the U.S. should remain committed to the international community as it withdraws from Afghanistan and cuts its defense budget. The group is scheduled to hold a launch event this evening in Washington attended by Doug Wilson, former assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs, who recently joined the think tank as a senior fellow. We've got the rundown, for Pros: http://politico.pro/1c226p4. And here's a first look at the full briefing book: http://bit.ly/18yag6a.
Lee Camp: 90% Of Us Are Groomed To Be Failures
04 Education, Civil Society, Cultural IntelligenceFrom our earliest days our education system separates us into the “gifted” and the not-so gifted. When we're just small children, many of us are put on a path to be cogs in the machine.
Mini-Me: Slow Ideas
Cultural IntelligenceHuh?
SLOW IDEAS
Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century.
Atul Gawande
New Yorker, 29 July 2013
EXTRACTS:
So what were the key differences? First, one combatted a visible and immediate problem (pain); the other combatted an invisible problem (germs) whose effects wouldn’t be manifest until well after the operation. Second, although both made life better for patients, only one made life better for doctors.
. . . . . . . .
This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful.
Jean Lievens: David Harvey on Copyright Wrongs – “Capitalists Hate Perfect Competition”
Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence
Capitalism today is about creating monopolies rather than competition.
