The Salon.com article titled Google Makes Us All Dumber: The Neuroscience of Search Engines probes the ever-increasing reliance on search engines and finds that the way we use them is problematic. This is due to the way our brains respond to this simplified question and answer process. The article stipulates that the harder we work for knowledge, the more likely we are to store it. When it is as simple as typing in a search query and reading a simple answer, we will forget the answer as easily as we found it. The article explains,
In my personal life I build trusted relationships one tax-avoiding, jurisdiction-shopping multinational corporation at a time. Show me a company that engages in labor arbitraging and offshore production in third-world countries paying starvation wages3 and that avoids taxes through shadow companies in Ireland (Apple Operations International) so it can reap real profits in the US only to pay virtual taxes in invisible jurisdictions4—what The New York Times calls the “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich”5—and I’ll show you a company that deserves my full faith and confidence. Passwords? Crypto keys? Security
questions? Not needed. Oh, corporate giants, have your digital way with me!
They're huge and ruthless and define our lives. They're close to monopolies. Let's make them public utilities
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Broadband as a public utility? If not for corporate corruption of our political process, that would seem like an obvious solution. Instead, our nation’s wireless access is the slowest and costliest in the world.
The data expose a dangerous malfunction in capitalism's engine room. Banks, mutual funds and investment firms used to ensure that citizens' savings were transformed into technical advances, growth and new jobs. Today they organize the redistribution of social wealth from the bottom to the top.
Today, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex, which covers 50 countries and 68.2% of world trade in services. The US and the EU are the main proponents of the agreement, and the authors of most joint changes, which also covers cross-border data flow. In a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre by the parties, the draft has been classified to keep it secret not just during the negotiations but for five years after the TISA enters into force.
Despite the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory structures, proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. The leaked draft also shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial data.
At the meta-level, the Ebola crisis is a perfect case study of why the UN (including the out-of-control Specialized Agencies such as the World Health Organization — WHO), the European Union (EU), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) need their own internal intelligence (decision-support) capabilities, and how corrupt intelligence has become at the Member State level — the US, specifically, lacks intelligence with integrity on Ebola, and no one in the White House or Congress has the intelligence — or the integrity — to see this as “core.”
University wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls
Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.
