The future of search may just be here, in the form of a specialized search engine courtesy of MIT (quelle surprise!) The Observatory of Economic Complexity (ECI) is the result of a 2010 Master Thesis in Media Arts and Sciences by one Alexander Simoes, and enjoys the continuing support of the MIT Media Lab‘s consortia for undirected research. A history of the project’s contributions is available on Github. Some technical details from the project’s FAQ page:
“Where does the data come from?
“The observatory provides access to bilateral trade data for roughly 200 countries, 50 years and 1000 different products of the SITC4 revision 2 classification. For historical SITC classification data, we use data from The Center for International Data from Robert Feenstra. For up to date HS classification data, we use data provided by UN COMTRADE.
This is a very sobering essay. Read this carefully and it will give you information to make informed choices with how a number of chemicals enter your life, or are kept out. Click through to see the many useful graphics that accompany this report.
Forty-one million IQ points. That’s what Dr. David Bellinger determined Americans have collectively forfeited as a result of exposure to lead, mercury, and organophosphate pesticides. In a 2012 paper published by the National Institutes of Health, Bellinger, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, compared intelligence quotients among children whose mothers had been exposed to these neurotoxins while pregnant to those who had not. Bellinger calculates a total loss of 16.9 million IQ points due to exposure to organophosphates, the most common pesticides used in agriculture.
Lutz Finger, reports from SxSW on the topic of algorithms, curation and the future, as the skills of content creators, data analysts and code programmers are seemingly converging for the first time.
Among others, he reports Steve Rosenbaum (founder of Magnify.net) significant own words at SxSW: “…a wise combination of human judgement enabled by algorithms will become the new king of content.”
But while there are great new tools, startups and ideas leveraging the great potential of big data and human curation, there is a big, invisible danger, still looming on us.
“The danger is that any algorithm might fall prey to someone trying to influence it.
Pirate Parties: This weekend, hundreds of pirates from all over Europe gathered in the European Parliament to formally found the European Pirate Party. It was an amazing gathering of determined activists, many of which were absolutely electrified at realizing the sheer scale of this movement, seeing 400 of Europe’s brightest activists gathering for the occasion. I had the honor of giving one of the opening keynotes (below).
The exact sequence of words has been slightly edited for readability.
Amelia Andersdotter: Tonight, we have the honor of welcoming a very special keynote speaker. He was the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party in 2006, a reaction to changes in the Swedish legislation brought about by the same directive that Julia Reda [the previous speaker] asks us to pay close attention to in the coming five years. Since 2006, he has succeeded not only in forming a political party in Sweden, but also to bring all of us together here. I would like to welcome up on the stage — Rick Falkvinge.
Rick Falkvinge: Thank you so much, Member of European Parliament Andersdotter, all staff, and all volunteers, for making this possible.
I would imagine a lot of us speak almost daily about tactical operational details about how we go about changing the world. It’s what we strive for, after all: we are here to change the entire world for the better. Nothing more, and nothing less.
So instead of talking about operational details, having so many prominent people here today, I take the opportunity to remind us all how large our goal and our opportunities are.
The title of this conference is Internet Governance. You see a lot of conferences called Internet Governance these days. The problem is, it’s a total contradiction in terms. This term, Internet Governance — this is not an Internet term. Nobody on the Internet would talk about Internet Governance. This is a governmental term, this is a corporate term. And there are reasons for that.
I know that the article “Sinkhole of Bureaucracy” is an example of a single case example. Nevertheless, the write up tickled my funny bone. With fancy technology, USA.gov, and the hyper modern content processing systems used in many Federal agencies, reality is stranger than science fiction.
This passage snagged my attention:
inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers. But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.
One of President Obama’s advisors is quote as describing the manual operation as “that crazy cave.”
The fastest growing religious faith in the United States is the group collectively labeled ‘Nones,” who spurn organized religion in favor of non-defined skepticism about faith. About two-thirds of Nones say they are former believers. This is hugely significant. The trend is very much that Americans raised in Christian households are shunning the religion of their parents for any number of reasons: the advancement of human understanding; greater access to information; the scandals of the Catholic Church; and the over-zealousness of the Christian Right.
. . . . . . .
Ironically, the rise of the Christian Right over the course of the past three decades may well end up being the catalyst for Christianity’s rapid decline. From the moment Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, evangelical Christians, who account for roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population, identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. Michael Spencer, a writer who describes himself as a post-evangelical reform Christian, says, ‘Evangelicals fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith. Evangelicals will be seen increasingly as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.”
Bottom Line: Peter Dale Scott gets it right. The “deep state” consists of individuals across all elements within and external to the government, who in the aggregate are able to leverage government capabilities while violating, with impunity, all Constitutional checks and balances. Related to this is the matter of funding and reach — if you follow the money, where do you end up? From New York banks to Texas energy to global drugs, there is a criminal network that is above the law and above the state.
